4 Suggestions for Online Experiences in a Small Church

I want to give four suggestions for small churches thinking about online experiences. Here at THECHURCH.DIGITAL, we define an online experience as broadcasting a church service or part of a church service. This is different than a digital church, online church, or online ministry.

A family came into our service in a snowstorm last weekend. I am good with faces, so I knew that I hadn’t met them before. The wife volunteered that they found us online and decided to come. We get that a lot at our small church. Our online experience helps people know what to expect if they come and lowers their anxiety.

An online experience is better than a good website because it gives a peek into the week-to-week experience at the church. Leaders want to say that the church is about relationships or discipleship or mission or life-change. But those are not what people think about when they are looking for a church. They want to know what the service is like. An online experience shows the church at this moment in time. That increases the trust-factor.

We never know when someone is ready to hear the good news of Jesus. But if we have an accessible online experience, then we don’t have to tell a person looking for hope to come back on Sunday. 

We can encourage a hurting person who needs to hear that God is near to the brokenhearted. Our parenting series is available to those who feel inadequate and unsure how raise their kids. We don’t have to make people wait for the next time the series is offered.

In a small church, you likely do some things well and some things not so well. Make a priority out of the things that you do well and feature those in your online experience. I learned this principle from Karl Vaters in Small Church Essentials . Hopefully, you preach good sermons. If that is good and the music is poor, then don’t feature the music. People will not wait for the sermon if the video of the music or the worship is poor. Just because it is an online experience, doesn’t mean it needs to be the entire experience. Figure out how to feature the best part of your service and feature that. 

We had a rough patch when transitioning worship leaders, so we cut out the musical portion of our online experience and went straight from our sermon bumper to the sermon. Our engagement in our online experience doubled after we cut out the poorly done worship. 

You might prerecord the sermon with a close-up camera so that you can feature a better video. If you post it as an online experience, no one has to know that you prerecorded it. That gives you the chance to fix audio, get better camera angles, and edit in series graphics, and videos. 

The mission of the church is to make disciples. Disciples need content to help them grow. Romans 12:1 says, “be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Social media allows us to help people be transformed by renewing their mind with content that we already have.

*Some people say, “sermons don’t make disciples.” If that is true for you, then you should reevaluate your preaching and services. Drop anything that doesn’t make disciples.

Content is what churches specialize in. Why not use your sermons, bible studies, classes, etc. to make disciples throughout the week? A regular and well-done online experience can help make disciples during the week through the content that we are already producing. With very little work, the content we already produce can be repackaged and available for ministry throughout the week.