Digital Missionaries and the Future of theChurch.digital

This past week, we unveiled the ninth version of theChurch.digital. Since I acquired the domain name in February 2018, theChurch.digital has been on a journey of constant growth, evolution, and the navigation of God's opportunities. On Thursday, September 12, 2024, at our inaugural Town Hall meeting on Discord, we made a significant announcement. We are transitioning into a digital mission-sending agency.

First of its kind, theChurch.digital will empower normies… ordinary, everyday people… with the Gospel and equip them with the understanding to be digital missionaries in their unique contexts.

Since pre-Covid, we have been working with digital-only expressions of church, which is not changing. theChurch.digital can still resource digital church planting through the digital missionary framework approach, and we will still champion digital and metaverse church planting.

However, our move to a digital mission-sending agency opens up a much larger ministry opportunity as we are now working with digital evangelists, disciple-makers, church planters, community builders, influencers, futurists, programmers, developers… essentially anyone who is a Christian and knows how to use a digital device has the potential to become a digital missionary. We want to empower them to reach “platforms” and “places.”

Platforms as Places: Understanding Digital Missiology

As we explored the idea of digital missions and started conversing with potential digital missionaries, an exciting question started: Can I be called to a digital platform? The concept of digital “calling” brought us to revisit an older philosophy Jason Morris discussed and promoted during the Covid season: Platforms as Places. Jason, theChurch.digital’s director of Equipping & Mobilization theorized during the Covid season that platforms like Twitch, Discord, Virtual Reality, and Facebook operated almost like Places.

latforms have their own culture, often representing more than one culture. Reaching people on TikTok is entirely different from reaching people on Facebook, just like connecting with people in Africa is going to be different from connecting in Brazil. These contexts allow for relational evangelism and relational discipleship to succeed digitally.

hat being said, theChurch.digital looks at platforms like TikTok, WhatsApp, and YouTube in the same way that global missions organizations look at places like India, Korea, and Argentina. We will equip digital missionaries with digital missiology and mobilize them with opportunities to do ministry digitally.

In the coming weeks, theChurch.digital will publicly define Platforms as Places, as well as the other features that define our digital missiology.

Equipping Digital Missionaries Today

To make the training more accessible, theChurch.digital is developing an online course, Equipping Digital Missionaries. Officially launching in early 2025, this will be a 13-week course including over 50 videos designed to give digital missionaries a framework of digital missions that they can contextualize.

Following a “flip the classroom” approach, the videos will be available to be watched asynchronously during the week, with a weekly huddle happening “synchronously” where participants can gather together online, discuss their learnings, and apply the principles learned in their ministry context.

The goal of theChurch.digital’s Equipping Digital Missionaries course will be to give participants a foundation of theological and tactical training. Upon completion, missionaries will be mobilized into outposts further to explore the technical aspects of their digital calling. For more information on the Equipping Digital Missionaries course, swing over to http://thechurch.digital/edm

Digital Outposts: Helping Grow, and Multiply, Today’s Digital Missionaries

TheChurch.digital is establishing outposts in different platforms and different places. Simply, outposts are a group of digital missionaries who share similar characteristics, whether they are wanting to 1) utilize the same platform or similar strategy or 2) reach a similar culture or context.

Outposts are the heart of theChurch.digital. Grouping similar digital missionaries provides an exciting opportunity. Outposts exist to encourage, explore, experiment, and empower digital missionaries:

• Encourage: Digital missionaries do something different to reach someone different. That being said, digital missionaries often report back that they have a limited support system in place, because their friends, family, and even their pastors “don’t understand them.” TheChurch.digital community overall is a place of encouragement, but outposts are a place for contextualized encouragement with contemporaries who have literally been where you are.

• Explore: In many ways, the Gospel has never been actively proclaimed on these platforms. Remember that there is plenty of digital room for contextualization, and what may work in some contexts may not work in others. Exploring the nuances of these platforms or even how different cultures utilize them is well worth the time investment. Outposts provide a safe space for digital missionaries to explore the subtle variations of these platforms in unique contexts.

• Experiment: Beyond exploring, outposts provide opportunities to experiment with different techniques and tactics, while getting feedback from a group of digital missionaries on the same road as you, or even a little further ahead than you. Learning to experiment is crucial for a digital missionary, but understanding the results is paramount. It’s nice to have an outpost of people with you. It is equally helpful having others around to encourage you if the experiment fails, or celebrate with you if the experiment is successful.

• Empower: Outposts are a group of people dedicated to the idea of kingdom over castle. Outpost leaders are not concerned with their own ministry, but run the outpost towards the idea of multiplying other digital missionaries. Operating as friends on mission, they are not driven or motivated by theological alignment as much as aligning to reach people in their unique contexts and collaborate to make that happen. 

Digital Missionaries & the Future of theChurch.digital

While digital missionaries are a new focus for theChurch.digital, empowering bi-vocational people to do ministry digitally has always been at the heart of theChurch.digital. Excitement doesn’t even start to describe our emotions as we move forward with a clear purpose of equipping and mobilizing normies for kingdom purpose.