Simply put, a Facebook pixel is a small snippet of HTML code that is placed on your website for tracking purposes. It’s similar to Google Analytics but specifically for Facebook, enabling advertisers to target and re-target more effectively. Installing a pixel allows Facebook to track visitors and categorize them in custom audience groups. This information can help you develop more effective ads that appeal to a specific audience’s interests while saving money.

It takes time, effort, and money to attract an audience, so once you have people actively engaging with your content, the next most effective step you can take for your ministry is to cultivate your relationship with your audience. Pixels are one way to re-engage your followers/visitors and ensure that your content is reaching them. Pixels can also help you customize the content they receive, taking into consideration their level of engagement and behavior and making sure your organization’s content stays relevant to their needs.

For example, suppose you have a website that tackles multiple difficult topics, and one of the most visited areas focuses on “What happens when we die?” You can re-target visitors to that specific page with Facebook ads for videos, new content, free books, etc., all related to a biblical perspective on death. You can do the same for your prophecy, health, and Sabbath sections as well.  

Custom audience options for pixels include:

• All web visitors
• People who visited specific pages
• Visitors by time spent
• Visitors by date
  
  

Another practical ministry example: Let’s say you are promoting a series of content highlighting health principles; you’re getting a lot of traffic and engagement on your website, but only a few people are taking advantage of the free book offer. A Facebook pixel allows you to re-target these engaged website visitors with a Facebook ad reminder to download or request the free book. This increases your conversion rate (offer downloads) by focusing on people who have already showed interest but who may have gotten distracted by the demands of work, family, and life. Modern life means people are busy. They may be indeed be interested but may need reminders (remember the “Rule of 7”). This is particularly true when it comes to advertisements for events.

Click here for a step-by-step guide from Facebook to learn how to set up a Facebook pixel for tracking.

Once you have your pixel set up, you'll also want to set up custom audiences in your ad account so you can strategically target certain types of people who are more likely to respond to your content and invitations. Once these are set up, Facebook will dynamically build up these audiences for your use in targeting ad campaigns. These audiences are considered warm audiences because of their relationship to your page and are generally more cost efficient. You can also create lookalike audiences and colder or broader audiences for wider outreach efforts. Keep these saved in your Facebook Ads manager for easy access when setting up campaigns.

• Facebook page engagers in the past 90, 180, or 365 days
  • People who have already expressed interest in your church and/or content
• Video engagement audiences
  • For example, you can re-target those who watch church service livestreams or video messages
• Website visitors in the past 90, 180, or 365 days
  • People familiar with you who have taken some interest
• People who have visited specific website pages
  • For example, Bible studies, youth pages, visitor pages, etc.
• Lookalike audience of page engagers
  • This is an easy way to find the top 1% of people similar to those already engaged; this audience is automatically formed at the national level, so you will need to geo-target by address when using this audience
• Lookalike audience of email list
  • People similar to people who have subscribed to your eNewsletters
• Lookalike audiences of those who signed up for events, reserved tickets, downloaded free books, etc., via online forms
  • People similar to those who have attended previous programs or received materials
• Parents with children in the age ranges relevant to your programs
  • Such as VBS and Pathfinders who live within driving distance
• Saved audience by age and/or gender geo-targeted to your community
  • Ideal for men/women's ministries, teen/young adult ministries, etc.
• Everyone within five miles of your church.
  • If you are located in a rural area, the distance can be increased, or the distance can be reduced for more densely populated areas. Aim for an audience of less than 50,000 people for cold ads inviting people to marriage programs, holiday events, etc.
    
    

To learn more about Facebook advertising, visit facebook.com/business

Most local churches and ministries have limited budgets. To make the most of your limited ad dollars, build your advertising on top of your organic distribution mechanism. Paid ads are most successful when they are accompanied by strong digital distribution. They enable you to reach further than you can organically and to target specific groups of people for outreach efforts.

Why spend any money when you can use the platforms for free?
Social media platforms are businesses that need to make money; therefore, they limit unpaid reach. This means less than 5–10% of your fan base (depending on the platform) will naturally receive your posts in their news feed. You can counteract this by promoting key posts to reach more of your fan base and by placing ads to expand your reach to new audiences.

To get started:

• Determine your target audiences (who you want to reach). Refer back to the section on understanding your audience for guidance.
• Determine your budget (how much you can spend).
• Start with a test, and then expand based on results.

A lot of people ask me, “How much does it cost to promote an event online?” But the beauty of social media ads is that the answer depends on what you can afford. Social media works very well for small budgets and non-profits. A little can go a long way, but it’s important to spend some money. As your confidence grows, and your familiarity with reaching your target audiences grows, you can increase your budget as needed. Ultimately, your budget depends on the size of your goals and your purpose. A small, local ministry may need to spend only $300 a year, whereas a nationwide campaign would need to spend at least $3,000 to create impact within a targeted audience. For all organizations, I recommend starting with a small ad budget and a clear objective that is easy to measure. This way you can learn and maximize your results as you grow.

Look for monies that can be redirected. Businesses that must balance their budgets or make a profit put most of their effort behind what is working. We should be just as shrewd. Too often, we pool our best resources and people into efforts with limited potential out of a misguided attempt to be fair or to meet accepted expectations. 

This will be different for every church or ministry, but it’s time to take a critical look at our programs. Determine your church’s strengths, and put all your efforts behind them. The Strength Finder (now CliftonStrengths) program operates on this premise for individuals and teams. We all love underdog or David and Goliath stories, where individuals or organizations overcome their weaknesses and beat the odds, but for most, thriving comes when we embrace what we are naturally good at. The underdog stories are typically outliers, and we should not operate under the assumption that we, too, are the exception to the rule. First, improve the functions required for your church’s operations, and put money behind keystone ministries with the most potential in the context of your membership and community. It might seem unfair to those ministries that don’t get as much support, but like the parable of the talents, you need to invest in the areas that are working the most effectively. Good stewardship means focusing on places where you can make an impact beyond day-to-day operations.

Another option is to find individuals willing to fund social advertising as an outreach initiative or personal ministry. I personally fund and run my local church’s social media advertising and website hosting. Over time, our church leadership has learned the value and potential of using these digital technologies for a variety of purposes. 

​Not every church is blessed with an experienced digital strategist, but this is an opportunity to allow a member with knowledge or interest in digital communications or marketing to develop their skills in a personal ministry that aligns with their abilities. If your church has staff, your communications lead can manage your ad account. This could also be a valuable skill for a younger member of your pastoral team to learn and take responsibility for. Either way, be sure to provide oversight so that expectations are clear, and the budget is respected.

As of 2020, Facebook still has the most sophisticated social media advertising platform for small organizations. It enables detailed targeting for small budgets on Facebook, Instagram, and third-party websites. However, many of these ad types are also relevant to other platforms. The technologies and platforms may change, but these “types” will still be relevant, regardless of the platform. Choose the types of ads that align with the key performance indicators discussed in the strong foundations section of this guide.

Here are the main types of ads that can be placed:

• Promote your page/profile
  • Increase page “likes” and awareness within a targeted community
• Website ads
  • Increase traffic to your website for a specific event/offer/information from members of a particular community
• Posts targeted to members and those who follow or engage with your page
  • Improve internal communication
• Ads targeted to your subscriber email list
  • Improve internal communication/awareness
• Video views to targeted audiences
  • Increase impact/expand the reach of your message
• Event response ads
  • Increase event/program awareness and attendance
• Messenger ads
  • Help facilitate conversation or generate leads for Bible studies
• Lead generation ads
  • Offer free materials and collect outreach lead contact information
• Retargeted messages
  • Based on behaviors such as content engagement and website visits that enable advertisers to follow up with relevant messages

Refer back to the section on understanding your audience, and use this framework to determine who your audience is and how you are going to target them through social advertising. Targeting allows you to maximize your ad dollars by ensuring you reach the right people instead of wasting money on those less likely to respond.

Most platforms allow you to target by:

• Location (e.g., country, state, city, address, or place)
• Age
• Gender
• Language
• Interest: Choose multiple to reach people interested in a specific topic or who are part of a particular group
• Connection: Fans of your page and their friends (or email list)
• Behavior: People who have interacted with specific content on your website
  
  

Optimize the effectiveness of your ads by:

• Limiting text in images and using high quality images
• Providing context but keeping text brief
• Targeting your ads to stretch your advertising dollars
• Including a clear call-to-action
• Being honest—no bait-and-switch marketing
• Including closed captions on videos
• Promoting content or programs that align with the felt needs of your target audience
• Familiarizing yourself with ad terminology and monitoring your campaigns closely
• Using trackable links in ads that direct traffic to your website to monitor performance in Google Analytics
• Setting up Google Analytics on your ministry’s website so you can monitor and understand how visitors interact with your website and where they come from
  
  

Always follow the basic principles for writing a strong social media post, discussed previously in this guide.

The right message is one that resonates with a felt need. When it comes to messaging and programming, make sure you are addressing a pain point or felt need within your target audience. Strive to understand those in your community, and tailor your outreach efforts and messaging accordingly. Remember, show empathy first, validate their experiences, be genuine, and offer practical advice/solutions/resources.
Never assume you know what your audience is interested in. Do the research, and create content and opportunities that meet people where they are in their spiritual journey. You can have the best targeting and the most well-crafted posts, but if the “product” is tone deaf to the real needs of the community you’re trying to reach, your ads will fail.

When crafting your message, follow this formula:
Empathy + Caring + Authentic + Practical Advice/Resources/Solutions

Example message: Marriage is hard; we're here to help. Join us for a free marriage program where you'll learn practical tips for improving your marriage. Click here to register in advance for your free book.

​When placing ads, make sure you’re strategizing for impact. Many of us can get caught up in vanity metrics such as how many followers we have. Remember, it’s not about how many people are following you online. The real question is, are people growing closer to Jesus because of your digital strategy? Perhaps your video received only 200 views, but if 200 people showed up for a Bible study, most of us would be ecstatic. Every view, comment, share, download, etc. represents a real person who has been influenced by your content and messages. 

Active social media partnerships are key to expanding your reach and branding. Social media is designed for community building, so create and cultivate online relationships with other ministries and organizations. Find organizations to build partnerships with either by location or topic. It is likely that you already have partnerships in place for creating events. Magnify their value by partnering for your digital communications campaign for the event. Be sure to make sure your partnerships are mutually beneficial to both parties. Don’t ask for any favors that you’re not willing to grant yourself. People will figure out quickly if it’s a one-sided relationship, and you’ll end up closing the door to future collaborations.

Who can you work with?

• Sponsors/donors
• Organizations and ministries already involved in the event
• Participants/speakers
• Local churches/related organizations
• Conferences and unions

Most of time, events don’t happen in a silo but rather involve several partners. I have found time and time again that active social media partnerships are a key element in successfully promoting events on social media. If you reach out to 10 contacts who each have a “small” social media following of 1,000 people, your message suddenly has the potential to reach up to 10,000 people online. Reach out to more contacts, with bigger fan bases, and you can see how your reach can grow exponentially.

Communicators typically have a lot on their plates, and social media manager may be just one of many hats that they wear throughout the work week. Contacts are often willing to promote partner events through their various digital channels, but time and resources are limited. With this reality in mind, providing your partners with a “promotions packet” is an effective and easy way to equip your contacts with the resources they need to easily become social media ambassadors and share your message.

Normally, when marketers reach out to contacts to ask for promotion on their behalf, there is an assumption that the partner will write the posts and generate the content. As a result, most requests are not prioritized and do not realize their full potential. A promotions packet, on the other hand, provides recommendations, pre-made social media posts, eNewsletter blurbs, tracking links, graphics, branded hashtags, and more. The social media manager needs only to copy and paste from the Word document and schedule. They can of course modify the message for their audience if desired or necessary, but they don’t have the burden of generating content. This approach also has the added benefit of allowing you to control the quality and consistency of your brand’s message as it is distributed through your partner’s channels.

I encourage you to create your own promotions packets following best practices for creating social media posts and to develop digital partnerships to help expand your reach in future campaigns. In a world of limited budgets, this approach costs you only time and effort.
 
One last important note: Make sure that when you reach out for help with promoting your ministry, you are not only willing to reciprocate but also able to follow through with such agreements. Partnerships should be mutually beneficial, and trust can be built and cultivated over time when both parties follow through on their promises.

It's hard to knock on someone’s door, even if we already know them. In fact, it’s not even socially acceptable nowadays to just show up unexpectedly at someone’s house in case they are busy when we stop by. We must call and schedule a visit first. Add the need for social (physical) distancing, and it becomes clear that the old way of evangelizing can no longer be the primary method. But you don't have to knock on a stranger’s door to share your faith. Nor do you have to create the content. Canvassers are not also the authors of the books they sell. The burden of content creation is not for all of us. 

Young people spend upwards of 9 to 18+ hours behind a screen each day. That's a lot of opportunity for us to share and reach people anywhere. Excluding periods of sleep and quarantine, how many people are normally home nine hours a day to answer the door? In normal daily life, many people leave the house early and come home late at night.
​
Digital door-knocking is when you share spiritual content on your social media profiles or through messaging and email to create an opportunity for people to engage with you about your faith. The spiritual content can be anything (a picture, text, video, blog, etc.); just be sure to include with it a personalized message about how it impacted you. Your friends and followers can scroll past it or choose to engage when it’s convenient for them. Given that a lot of people could be stuck at home with extra time on their hands because of COVID-19 or a future crisis, social media may be their main source of entertainment and connection. There’s a lot of opportunity right now for us to share and reach people everywhere using digital technologies. Success can no longer be measured only by counting people in a building but, rather, we must consider whether or not we’re building a kingdom. 

​Word-of-mouth is still the strongest marketing mechanism for getting the word out about a product or cause. People always trust the opinion of their friends and family over what a brand says about itself. This is why reviews and testimonies are so powerful. We participate in word-of-mouth marketing every time we share about a product or experience with others. We might share in person, but word-of-mouth marketing often takes place on social media and through messaging applications and texting, etc. We do this constantly when it comes to our other interests and don’t even realize it. In terms of sharing the gospel, this just means doing the thing you do all the time online but doing it for the kingdom. In other words, be intentional with what you share.  

​Here are some digital ways individuals can distribute our messages:

• Forward emails.
• Text invitations with an info link to contacts, or send invitations via messenger apps.
• Share content from your church’s profiles or a ministry you follow and add a personalized message.
• Live-stream events, sermons, Bible study groups, etc., from your social media profiles.  
• Hit “like,” “love,” or “wow” on ministry Facebook posts to increase organic reach.
• Post to community groups or apps like Next Door about upcoming events.
• Find digital ways to connect with neighbors and community; then share your faith with them.
• Follow, friend, or join online Christian groups to help increase their digital influence.

Create a culture of sharing and content engagement within your church community. Nearly everyone is on social media. Even if you have an older congregation, a good many of them are likely on Facebook and have an email address. Don't assume that they are not; ask and find out what platforms they use.
​
Social influence can be both analog and digital. Churches do well with analog distribution (printed flyers for example); however, we need to start leveraging the digital social influence of our members. Even in a small church with 50 congregants, if half were on social media and were connected to just 50 people within the community (outside of the congregation), that's a potential reach of 1,250 people. This is a low estimate, but you get the idea. Train your membership to function like a social media “pod.” A “pod” is a group used to increase engagement on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook but can apply even to email. Members of a pod agree to comment, like, and share each other’s content or the content of a particular entity such as a church or ministry. Teach your membership to engage and share your church content on a weekly basis as a form of evangelism/outreach.


Pod commitments vary but typically fall into three categories:

1. All users must engage with every post within an hour.
2. All users must engage with every post within 24 hours.
3. All users must engage with relevant posts whenever they can.
   
   

A congregation that understands the value of participating in ministry this way could serve as a powerful reach vehicle for souls. To realize this potential, they must be equipped and encouraged. Determine members’ strengths and train them to use their strengths.

Be sure to:

• Take time in meetings and during service or choir rehearsals to prioritize technology.
• Provide hands-on training to church members.
• Ask them to take out their phones and take action right in the moment.
• Empower a designated person to post about key events to local groups or community apps like Next Door.
• Encourage members to mark Facebook events with “going” or “interested” to increase organic reach.
• Encourage them to invite others to events via email/text or on Facebook.
• Encourage them to “like,” “wow,” or “love” important content on your Facebook profile (and other social media platforms); this increases organic traffic.
• Tell them when to expect emails and ask them to forward emails to their contacts.
• Send out weekly emails with links to content you want members to share or engage with.
• Keep them posted on how their efforts are working and create a sense of teamwork.
• Get them excited about digital discipleship through sharing your excitement and testimonies about how it has worked.

My local church is predominantly older, and we have around 200 members—not a mega church by any standard. For our holiday programs and special events, the leadership asks me to lead promotion. Beyond targeting the community with social advertising, I also spend a lot of time rallying the membership to hand out flyers, forward emails, share on social media, text people, etc. This is new for them and out of their comfort zone, but we are a close-knit community, and our members really do seek to help each other.

At the end of our six-week campaign for our annual Christmas play, 393 tickets had been reserved in advance, and on the day of the event, we packed the house with around 500 in attendance. Now, the DC-Metropolitan area has a lot of holiday opportunities, so people did not have to choose us. By and large, most people who reserved tickets online said they had heard about the event from a friend or family member, via email or social media. Word-of-mouth out-performed paid social advertising. For our previous event at Easter, by contrast, with no promotion strategy and much less competition in the area, only 100 tickets were reserved in advance.

After the Christmas play, we sent a survey follow-up to gather feedback to better understand our audience and let them know that we valued their opinion. This allowed us to understand how many non-Adventists attended the program. In this case, 20% of survey respondents were not Adventists. It also gave us an opportunity for service by adding this question: Is there anything we can help you with? Let us know how we can bless you, and please provide your contact information.

Here is an example of how with the right coaching, even an older congregation can realize their untapped potential for helping their church better reach the local community through increased awareness. This example served as a test run and, since then, all the tickets for our special programs have been reserved in advance of the event.   
​
This example had immediate results, but having a congregation that consistently engages in digital door-knocking would have a long-tail effect that we may not fully appreciate this side of heaven. Using this model, our messages of hope and wholeness could be spread to every corner of the digital space and, while not everyone is able to walk through the door of a church, they will be able to connect with God.  

​This might be heretical to ask, but are we too focused on church attendance, at least in the short term? I cannot help but wonder if the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic crisis is a wake-up call to the Church. Churches have been forced to shut their doors to help reduce the spread of the virus. Knowing what the Bible warns about end-time events, this is not going to be a unique historical moment but rather just a precursor to the time of trouble. The Church will need to rely more and more on digital technologies. The time to develop the necessary skills and shift our understanding of what church means is now. Remember, church is not a building, it’s a people. When fleeing persecution, the early Church took the gospel to new regions out of necessity. So, too, we must now take the gospel message to the digital mission field and spread our message of hope and wholeness when it is needed most. 

​It used to be that people would have to travel, sometimes long distances, to hear the gospel message from a preacher or evangelist. Now, we can browse speakers on YouTube from the comfort of our home. Until recently, the barrier to entry was so high in publishing that only the top theologians, pastors, and authors could get their writings into the public’s hands. With the advent of social media, blogs, and vlogs, we're all publishers now, and we can each be distribution centers within our areas of digital influence. 

​We have the gospel—the greatest story ever told—of Christ's birth, life, self-sacrificing death, resurrection, and soon return. As the Seventh-day Adventist Church, we also have the Three Angels’ Messages, sent to all of God's children in every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. We, as a people, have the gift of prophecy, the guidance of Ellen G. White, and a health message for better living.   

​The role of distributors in the Digital Discipleship and Evangelism model is to use digital tools and technologies to share these messages within their sphere of digital influence.

​Although we’re facing the biggest communication shift in 500 years, church communication hasn’t really changed in thirty years. I can’t help but wonder if God is using COVID-19 to push the Church into the digital age. While God doesn’t cause suffering, He can—just as when the early Church fled persecution and spread the gospel—use the pandemic to accomplish His will. Hopefully, in a few years time, we’ll look back and recognize this crisis as the catalyst that resulted in a major communication shift for the Church.

Five hundred years ago, the Gutenberg press* was developed, and it revolutionized the world and helped rapidly spread the gospel. It dramatically sped up the process and reduced the cost of printing. It altered society through the unrestricted circulation of information and the increase in literacy. The printing of the Gutenberg Bible marked the start of the so-called “Gutenberg Revolution” and played a key role in the Protestant Reformation. Just as the Protestant reformers leveraged the printing press, we must use digital tools to share our message. Again, society and the way we communicate has been dramatically altered. It has never been easier to communicate, but it’s also never been harder to cut through the noise. Therefore, it is essential to be intentional and strategic with how we use digital tools to spread our message.  

*Note: It’s only fair to mention that several Asian civilizations had developed a type of printing technology prior to the Gutenberg press. These cultures did not adopt it as rapidly nor as widely as Europe did. Therefore, these earlier versions did not impact civilization to the same extent as the European technology. 

​I firmly believe the next great awakening will be a digital one. It will take each and every one of us acting as digital disciples to share the gospel and spread the Three Angels’ Messages, with a loud voice, to the ends of the earth. We can start by reaching those within our own spheres of digital influence. We use digital tools every day to communicate and share ideas, yet we have not leveraged their potential for kingdom building. We are all called to be disciples, to be distributors of the gospel. To share truth through these powerful technologies—this is our generation’s Great Commission.

​Faith is on the decline in Western society. Put simply, we have become the mission field. Instead of hopping on a plane to reach people where they are, we can now go online and use the platforms people use to share hope and wholeness in a way that is accessible and comfortable for them. 

​Challenge question: How well do you really know your neighbors and your community? It’s never been easier to connect, but as a society we’ve become disconnected from our immediate community. Why is it so hard to connect with and reach people? 

People are busy. We're overworked, overloaded, and overwhelmed, trying to keep up with a constantly growing to-do list. Many people are just trying to get by and get through the day. How many of us feel this way? Why would we expect our target audiences to be any different? Perhaps we lack community because we do not have time or energy left for our neighbors. This, of course, is the Devil’s design; keep people busy enough that they don’t have time for each other or for God.

Amid the chaos, the younger generations feel safe behind their screens, which provide a degree of distance and anonymity. Remember, on average across all age groups, we spend almost three times as much time socializing on social media as we do socializing in person. This dramatically increases for individuals under 30 years old. Remember, if you want to reach people, you must go where they are and spend time with them. As I’ve said in previous sections, today, that means going online to share our messages.  

In the weeks since COVID-19 shut down churches across America and the world, I’ve seen an unprecedented amount of creativity and innovation from churches and ministry leaders. What was previously considered impossible or unimportant has become both possible and important overnight. For many, such as the physically disabled and those unable to attend church in person for other reasons, these changes are welcome and long-anticipated accommodations— accommodations that should have been offered when the technology first became available. Our hesitancy to embrace change left many behind and isolated long before COVID-19. It’s unfortunate that it took a pandemic to motivate the Church to embrace digital technologies, but here we are.

Change is not only possible but also necessary. Now, we must figure out together what the “new Church” will look like. When the dust settles, society will return to a new normal with new habits and expectations. The changes we make now will set us up for success or failure in the years to come.

First and foremost, online church must be different. It can’t be just a streamed program of a few people in an otherwise empty sanctuary. Church is not a program or a building, it’s a faith community sharing their relationship with God and taking action to improve the well-being of others. We must consider the experience of the individuals participating and think empathically about what they expect and need.

Beyond meeting the spiritual needs of church members, digital technologies can be used to mobilize a congregation for community and service in the digital space. What starts in the digital space is not necessarily nor ultimately confined to the digital space. These tools and technologies can create impact in the real world and be leveraged to meet the real physical needs of the community. We can still be the hands of Christ reaching out to help others in their need; it will just be in a way that is different from what we’re currently comfortable with.

We must think creatively about how the “church experience” can be translated to the digital space. This will take the creativity and innovation of everyone, experimenting and trying new things to figure out what works best. It will be different for each congregation and community. We are now in a period of rapid development, innovation, and customization. It’s an exciting time, and I am personally energized seeing God working through His church during this time of change.   

This also means that our choice of our “home” church is no longer restricted by physical location. Churches that adapt well will draw members from everywhere to their online church experience. The barriers to entry that once prevented people from attending in person have been stripped away. Those who were previously at a disadvantage are now on equal footing with the rest of the community. When COVID-19 is all over, the structures we are now implementing should stay in place to continue to reach those we’ve previously left behind. Besides, we know the scriptures: this may be only the beginning of such troubles. There will be more pestilence and an ongoing need for digital technology. We must stop thinking of this as a temporary shift and realize technology’s long-term potential.   
​
You may be asking: How can we build community online? How can we make online church special? What are the best practices for online church? 

• Use interactive tools. Use tools such as live chat and social media for real-time interaction. People are social creatures; let’s create opportunities for social engagement online. This may feel like a distraction from the sermon, but understand that your audience (especially young people) have already been accessing social media while you preach. Digital interactive tools may be out of your comfort zone, but for many, they are a vital enhancement to their worship experience.
  
  
• Rethink your service and music. Remember, put yourself in your online audience’s shoes. What are they supposed to do during song service? Some may sing along, but most won’t. It’s awkward to watch people singing and pretending a congregation is singing with them. Consider having special music instead and, overall, keep music interludes brief.
  
  
• Shorten the service. Don’t try to fill the same amount of time as a regular church service, and limit dead space where nothing is happening. Keep the worship service moving.
  
  
• Speak directly to the audience. Zoom in close with the camera and let the audience see your face and your expressions. A good rule of thumb is to enable your audience to see the whites of your eyes. Speak to your audience as though you are speaking to each person individually. Acknowledge your audience, engage directly with them, and encourage comments, likes, and shares. Ask them to open their Bibles and follow along with the scriptures. You can even encourage them to take notes or type in answers to your questions in the comments section of the livestream. Avoid standing alone on an empty stage with the camera zoomed out at a distance. Bringing the camera in close will make your sermon more inviting and personal. Click here for more live-streaming and video tips.  
  
  
• Turn your livestream into evergreen content. When the service is over, repurpose longer videos into shorter focused clips that will be searchable long into the future. Church announcements have a short shelf life and should not live indefinitely on your YouTube channel or website. Cut out just the message and other key elements such as the children’s story to create content optimized for search. To learn how, visit:
  • Evergreen Livestreams: 4 Ways to Turn Livestreams into Great Video Content
  • How to Start Your Own Video Ministry (Free Course)
    
    
• Meet together in the digital space. Use video conferencing technologies to keep your regular Bible studies and prayer meetings going. Zoom is a great tool. It’s easy to use, and a basic account is free. You may find that your attendance increases now that physical barriers like traffic have been removed. Click here for guidelines for hosting online small groups, forums, and video conferences.
  
  
• Continue to serve the community. For too long, churches have been the building up the street. Let’s not let the church now become the empty building up the street. Church should be a group of people mobilized to serve, actively engaged in improving the well-being of their broader community. Click here for 10 ways to serve your community using digital tools during COVID-19.
  
  
• Create content to help people move along their spiritual journey. God’s church is 24/7. Therefore, we should endeavor to put Christ on display every day through our digital influence, not just one day a week. We should create digital content that speaks to the spiritual needs of people and seeks to address their deepest longings. To get started with content creation and evangelism, read these blogs:
  • What Role Do Content Creators (Creatives) Play?
  • Basics of Content Creation and Strategy
  • A Deeper Dive into Content and Creative Planning Through Keyword Research
  • Content Evangelism: Engaging Your Audience and Improving SEO
  • Writing Effectively for Online Audiences
  • Basic Principles for Creating a Strong Social Media Post
    
    
• Mobilize your congregation to become a reach vehicle for souls through digital door knocking. Digital door knocking is when a person shares spiritual content on their social media profiles or through messaging and email to create an opportunity for people to engage with them about their faith. Spiritual content can be anything (a picture, text, video, blog, etc.), and should include a personalized message. A person’s friends and followers can scroll past it or choose to engage when it’s convenient for them. Given that a lot of people are stuck at home with extra time in their schedule, social media may be their main source of entertainment and connection. Create a culture of sharing and content engagement within your church community. Train your members to share your church’s content (created or curated) on a weekly basis as part of ministry efforts. There’s a lot of opportunity right now for us to share and reach people everywhere using digital technologies. A congregation that understands the value of participating in ministry this way could serve as a powerful reach vehicle for souls. Success can no longer be measured only by counting people in a building; rather, we must consider whether or not we’re building a kingdom. 
  
  
• Create opportunities for prayer online. Even the skeptical may long for someone to care enough to pray for them personally. Social media is a powerful tool for soliciting prayer requests and following up on those requests. Prayer can be just one “like,” comment, or message away. Online communication lowers the barrier to asking, making it easy for people to reach out when they may be reluctant to do so face to face. Click here for more ideas for prayer opportunities in the digital space.
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• Develop a 360° community care strategy. In this time of crisis and beyond, we should work to extend the church experience beyond the confines of time and space in a building to an involved community that provides 24/7 support not only to members but also to our broader contacts. To be effective, churches should cultivate and nurture healthy communities, both analog and digital, both within the church and in the community, thereby better positioning ourselves to provide a ministry of healing and broad networks of support. For ways to do this with your congregation, read these blog posts:
  • What's the Role of Engagers?
  • What Does Community in the Digital Space Look Like?
  • What Does a 360° Community Care Strategy Look like?
    
    
• Empower Digital Disciples. Content creation, engagement, and distribution are not limited to the official Church brand and accounts. Make a point of reaching out to young people, and let them know that their talents in this area are highly valued even if they are not part of the core team. Some people just need permission and a little mentorship to realize their talents and passion for personal ministry. Everyone has social influence through texting, messenger applications, email, and social media. Encourage and inspire them to use it to build God's kingdom. To learn how, read these two blogs:
  • Practical Tips for Digital Discipleship and Engagement
  • Growing as Disciples
    
    
• Invite creativity and new ideas. Listen to the tech savvy and to young people. Now is the time to make them feel that their spiritual gifts are valued by their church. Young people in particular are digital natives and instinctively know a great deal about how to leverage technology. They are eager to help shape the future of their church and will be more likely to stay if they are involved.
  
  
• Train your members. Take the time to show your members, especially older members, how to participate and use digital tools. Ask your younger members to create tutorial videos or to FaceTime with older members to talk them through using technology for worship and ministry.
  
  
• Protect your community. Going online means getting used to dealing with negative comments. For antagonists who threaten the health of your digital community, hiding/deleting comments, muting people, and even banning them are options. Click here to download a response assessment flow chart to help you navigate the sometimes rocky waters of online engagement.
  
  
• Be ready to adapt to and get comfortable with change. Change is the new normal. Embrace new ideas and technologies as they become available. Get creative and don’t be afraid to try new things. If it doesn’t translate, that’s okay. You will have many more chances to figure out what works. 

 
We want our church to come back stronger and more unified from this experience. Normally, we talk about how digital technologies are a powerful means to scale up traditional ministry and evangelism, but COVID-19 has pushed the need for digital technology to become our priority. We’ve created and curated several resources we think you will find useful to help migrate your worship service and help you build an online community for your church. Visit SDAdata.org/goingdigitalcovid19 to get started.
 
Click here to learn more about digital evangelism and discipleship.

​The weekend that the world woke up to the COVID-19 pandemic saw a wave of closings and radical changes to our daily lives never before seen in the history of mankind. The same weekend brought a stunning amount of anti-Christian rhetoric online. I am an administrator for over 50 ministry social media accounts, and my notifications were filled with hateful comments, aggressively mocking us and our collective faith and, in some cases, even blaming Christians and our “foolish” thinking through some convoluted logic that I didn’t bother to try to understand. What shook me the most was that this behavior was foretold in the Bible. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the scriptures, but in my mind, it was always for some far future time. I certainly wasn’t expecting to experience this first-hand on March 15, 2020.

One repeated phrase stuck out for me as I combed through the comments, deleting them and banning hostile people in an effort to protect our faith communities from continued harassment in this time of crisis. I lost count of how many times I read, “Where is your God now?” Over and over again, I saw the same comment, sometimes accompanied by rude pictures mocking our Savior. The hostility from these armchair antagonists was deeply concerning.

But the question remains, “Where is my God now?” In the days that followed, I began to see an immense amount of creativity and innovation emerging from the Church as pastors and ministry leaders began to adapt.

When fleeing persecution, the early church took the gospel to new regions out of necessity. Two thousand years later, we find ourselves in a similar situation. We must now take the gospel message to the digital mission field and spread our message of hope and wholeness when it is needed most.

We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).

In Daniel 3, God didn’t deliver the three Hebrew boys from the fire; He delivered them IN the fire to act as witnesses to King Nebuchadnezzar and his kingdom. While in the fire, the three boys came near to God and walked with the preincarnate Christ. Their experience served a greater purpose and testifies to us even today. God didn’t create the fire, the persecution, or the pestilence, but He can steer His church in this crisis to accomplish His will for the salvation of souls. He can and will manifest His power so that the living may know that the Most High rules over mankind (Daniel 4:17). 

It appears that the world is falling apart, and people are paralyzed with fear. Where is God now? God is on the move in every church and in the heart of every digital missionary who is stepping out in faith to accomplish our mission. He doesn’t need us to fulfill His work, but He invites us to work alongside the Holy Spirit. For digital advocates like me, this is a long-awaited and surprising answer to prayer.

It’s unfortunate that it took a pandemic to motivate the Church to embrace digital technologies on a large scale. For people who know that the end is coming, we have dragged our feet too long. COVID-19 is a kick in our complacency and a wake-up call to jump on the digital bandwagon. We have had access to these tools for over a decade, and I believe the Holy Spirit has been pleading with us to use them. Previously, many of us advocated for rethinking church in the digital age to meet the needs and expectations of the younger generations. Our voices were often dismissed as too extreme. Overnight the landscape changed; now we are forced to rethink church without the building for everyone. Perhaps this is the point. We’ve gotten too accustomed to thinking of church as a place to go to for a few hours a week, and not as people in action, striving to improve the well-being of others and spreading the good news.

Now is the time to focus on the future and on what the Church can become. Until now, those of us advocating for digital technologies have been up against systems and traditions that have been difficult to change. However, these structures and mindsets are quickly becoming obsolete in this new reality. The current generation no longer has the option of embracing change or leaving it to the next generation. The time is now; otherwise, we will become irrelevant. Change is never easy, but anything is possible with the Lord.

This shock to our society is nothing to fear; God is always with us, and we must continue to embrace this new reality to continue the work. Make no mistake, we are never going back—COVID-19 will fundamentally change how businesses, organizations, and society functions. Everyone across the generations will be forced to utilize digital tools for productivity and daily life. When this is over, and we can once again embrace our brothers and sisters, we will all have to tighten our belts from the economic fallout. Travel will be a luxury, while the positive impact on the environment may solidify many of our behavioral changes. Only God knows for sure how this will change the world, but the Bible tells us that this is only the beginning of the birth pains; there is more pestilence and tribulation to come. We may never fully be able to leave physical distancing behind, but time spent in isolation can be filled with seeking for truth and assurance in our messages of hope and wholeness. People will continue to turn to the Internet for companionship, understanding, information, anonymity, and more. We must be the voice that answers back online in these times of crisis and beyond.  
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COVID-19 is not the end, but it is a warning—a warning to God’s church to wake up and get ready. Jesus is coming, and we haven’t finished the work. This crisis is an opportunity to prepare and mobilize. It’s time for a generation of digital evangelists and disciples to carry the Gospel to the digital mission field, which may well be the final mission field. This is our generation’s Great Commission.