One major question that you should ask yourself about any piece of content uploaded to social media is, “Why would anyone care to watch or listen?” While uploading your full worship service will certainly be a blessing to your current church body, think about each online viewer as a first-time guest.
 
Before a prospective viewer can get to the actual message, many ministries force them to sit through 20−30 minutes of content that is irrelevant to them. Why should someone who has never been to your church care about the announcements, special music, or offertory?
 
Instead of uploading your program’s entire livestream to YouTube, a better approach would be to optimize your content for this specific platform once the live event is over. Realize that YouTube is a search engine; it’s a social community with its own subculture and set of social norms. Upload just the individual sermons or messages from your evangelistic series or camp meetings, and optimize the videos to be found via search. 

Break your livestreams and longer videos into smaller segments for distribution and community engagement on YouTube and other social media platforms such as Facebook and IGTV. Consider breaking your videos into two- to three-minute, easy-to-watch clips that highlight the key points of an inspiring message, or pull out the children’s stories into their own dedicated playlist.

Your goal should be to create as much evergreen content as possible to promote your message, church, or ministry to seekers. Capturing the attention of your audience several different times can help build trust and value regarding your ministry. Evergreen content can be shown to new audiences repeatedly while retaining its intrinsic value, meaning it doesn’t become less interesting or less relevant over time. Be sure to avoid including the date in the title of your video or mentioning it in graphics or dialogue during the selected message. Perception is important in outreach. The more dated your content seems, the less relevant it will appear, even if it still carries tremendous value.

Questions to consider before uploading your videos:

1. Will my audience still care about what is covered in this video?
2. How in-demand is the information being presented?
3. If I was a part of my audience, would I spend time watching it?
4. What is the overall replay value of the video(s)?
5. Is the content in easy-to-digest segments that my audience can view on the go?
6. Does this video address a common question or solve a problem?

Follow the guidelines outlined in the How to Start A YouTube Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide.  These guidelines will help position your video in the best possible way, not only to be found, but also get watched. Be sure to follow these steps because your content cannot lead people to Christ unless it is viewed.

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.   
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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. 

COVID-19 has forced everyone to adapt quickly. Many pastors are attempting to hold church online, or post sermons for members to view. Many are using smartphones or a webcam on a computer to get the job done. Here are some simple things you can do if all you have is your smartphone.
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1. Audio First—Silent movies are largely a thing of the past. Consumers of media are very interested in being able to hear and understand what is being said. Therefore, audio is key to a good production. There are a couple simple things you can do to improve the audio on your recordings with only your smartphone.
   1. ​If you have a bluetooth earpiece that you use for hands free, use that for your presentation. It may look a little unusual at first, but it’s designed for spoken communication and should work well.
   2. If the earpiece is not available, use your smartphone's microphone. Modern smartphones have very good noise canceling microphones. I am often impressed at how well the iPhone does with just the built-in microphone. In most cases, this is far better than what’s built into a laptop computer, or the microphone that comes with your desktop computer.
   3. Minimize all other sounds in the room. This may sound obvious, but it is often overlooked. Send the kids and dog outside for a little while. Turn off all the phones, alarms and such. And don’t overlook mechanical noises. Often furnace blowers make a noticeable background noise. Turning the blower off during your recording can make a significant difference.
   4. Get close to the phone/microphone. Reducing the distance improves your audio presence. Getting close also maximizes your audio compared to any extraneous noises that may be present. Stand as close to your phone as possible while still getting a reasonable picture.
      
      
2. Presentation—Good presentation is important.
   1. ​Consider standing. People typically make better presentations when standing. Standing comes across with authority and presentations may be taken more seriously. For preachers, it is often more natural to preach a sermon to a camera while standing.
   2. Consider making presentations shorter than normal. There are far more distractions to your congregation viewing on a computer. Holding their attention may be harder than when in person. Condense your message as much as possible while you are getting comfortable presenting virtually.
   3. Present with more energy than you think you need. Energy gets lost in the process of video recording. What seems like an excessive amount of energy when you are presenting will look normal when viewed.
   4. Also, keep in mind that people don’t know what to do when watching prayer online. Consider that this may be an awkward time for your viewer and do what you can to help them. Shorter prayers are one option. Inviting them to keep their eyes open and pray with you is another. Mostly be sensitive to the awkwardness of the viewer who does not know what the social standard protocol is for online prayer. Do what you can to help them out.
      
      
3. Camera technique—Think simple and stable. Here are some basic things you can do to make your video look good.
   1. Stability—Keep the camera stable. I know you may not have a tripod, but be creative. If you are using your smartphone, you can cut a holder out of cardboard and set it on the shelf. Look in your car—steal your car phone holder and suction cup it to a window in your house.
   2. Keep the camera at eye level. Mounting the camera above eye level minimizes your visual authority. Mounting it below eye level makes people feel like you are looking down on them. Mounting the camera at eye level will give you good authority and allow your viewer to be comfortable too.
   3. Frame the picture to show yourself and minimize all the distractions. Remember from section one to get as close to the phone or camera/microphone as is reasonable. Frame the images so your elbows are at the bottom and your head is at the top—this works well for formal presentations and should keep you close enough to the microphone to be heard well.
   4. Keep the background as minimal as possible. Seeing your home decorations or photos on your bookshelf may be interesting, but it may distract from what you are saying.
      
      
4. Lighting—Lighting is important for a good image. For many people seeing your lips move, the expressions on your face, and the emotion you exude can be a key in facilitating good communication. Lighting makes sure these things are seen.
   1. If you use a suction cup from your car to mount your phone to the window, it’s likely you will have all the lighting you need. And if it’s overcast outside, you will
      have a lighting setup that professional photographers will covet.
   2. If you can’t use natural light, consider using a light and bouncing it off a wall in front of you. The reflection off the wall will soften the light and make it more even. When I teleconference, I bounce my desk light off the wall in front of my desk to add a little light in my eyes. A small amount can make a big difference.
   3. Make sure you don’t have any very bright lights directly over you or behind you. They tend to be distracting. If you go into more advanced lighting techniques, there are reasons to use them, but for now avoid them. Concentrate on lighting your face.
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Like everything else, we learn by researching and trying. There are obviously things that will increase the production value, but when the resources are limited and time is critical, these four basic points (audio first, presentation, camera technique, and lighting) should get you going with a product that can be seen, heard, and understood.