Mission in a Digital World

A pastor received a letter after visiting a school in Uganda, it read:

"Yesterday, I went to school and I actually cried, I found over 500 students gathered praying in the school hall for the first time and you coming brought revival in school administration. In the hall only 2 students had Bibles and the leaders were copying scriptures on the blackboard. The messages you preached and the tracts you made it’s a life changing message and God is using you in a powerful way to reach out to the lost souls. Thanks Pastor."

God does great things and it’s amazing to be a part of it. The message shared and the tracts the Pastor gave out were from our weekly sermon notes we email out to over 80 Bishops, ministers, and church leaders across the world. But before we continue, let’s first understand the need for digital mission by answering some key questions:

Everyday Church Online was founded and grounded in some key Bible verses that emphasized the need for digital mission:

“Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:19-20 NIV

“He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” 
Mark 16:15 NIV

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 
Acts 1:8 NIV

“On arrival, they got the church together and reported on their trip, telling in detail how God had used them to throw the door of faith wide open so people of all nations could come streaming in.” Acts 14:27 MSG

We launched Everyday Church Online on Sunday 20th September 2015. Time and time again we experienced God promoting our digital mission from the most unexpected places, such as BBC Radio and BBC World Service.

In the first couple of years, God really encouraged us with some great prophesies that got us through the initial and often unexpected challenges of launching our digital mission:

Like Noah, God has asked you to build something that might not make sense to others. They will not understand and mock you. But what is being built will be the thing that God will use to save the lost.

Like Nehemiah, you are building something that requires focus and the right tools in one hand, but in the other hand to be equipped and prepared to defend the work and progress from attacks.

We know that behind every number is a person, or a group of people, with a story and here are a couple.

Bijay
An active member since 2020, lives in Nepal, and since joining us has now started a church of over 100 people, with multiple Life Groups. He preaches in other communities and runs outreach missions beyond his community including to Katmandu. 2 years ago, they had major flooding where houses were lost in the river and no food to eat. They also suffered persecution and had their Bibles and resources destroyed. In response as a church, we were able to bless them with a financial gift to help with the recovery from the flooding and to purchase more Bibles and resources for his ministry.

Joseph
An active member since 2017 and lives in Tanzania, as a farmer. He started a small Bible study group based on the digital resources we sent him. He now has a growing church congregation, a midweek Bible study group, and he preaches in other towns and villages. He does regular outreaches in his community and distributes our resources that he has translated into Swahili. As a church, we were able to bless him with financial support to purchase equipment and resources for his ministry.

Your generous giving to Everyday Church made it possible for us to support these ministries over the years, thank you.

For a season, Everyday Church Online ran a digital mission in other native languages:

• German
• Italian
• Russian
• Spanish

Everyday Tserkov is our Russian Online Church which is still going strong and reaching the Russian speaking world (258 million), often bridging the gap between warring countries.

During the lockdown, it was a great privilege to have all the London venues join Everyday Church Online on digital mission. We were also able to help many other churches and ministries create their own online services and ministries.

This is just a tiny glimpse of what has happened over the last 9 years and with all that has been shared, the most incredible thing is seeing God at work through Everyday Church Online. As a global online congregation, we have experienced all around the world amazing answers to prayer, commitments made, healings, reconciliations, Baptisms, receiving the Holy Spirit, miraculous stories and testimonies, churches started, Life Groups created, families reunited, marriages restored, and so, so, so much more. God is so gracious and good!

Seeds of Faith
In 1780, the Duke of Atholl had a problem. He wanted to plant a new forest on a mountainside on his Scottish estate, however it was so perilous a place that no man could reach the location to plant his seeds. What’s more, the Duke’s vision was for 15-million more trees. He had a big problem, with no obvious answer.

The solution ended up coming from a most unlikely quarter. A landscape painter called Alexander Nasmyth spotted two unused cannons on the estate. He devised a tin missile filled with seeds that could be shot long distances, exploding to shower seed across a wide area. This slightly eccentric approach worked so well that the Duke became known as ‘Planter John’ and Robert Burns dedicated a poem to him on his tree-planting exploits. The forest still stands today.

The word broadcasting originally comes from agriculture, to describe the wide scattering of seed. It is the type of sowing that is in the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:3-9.

The story of the Duke and Nasmyth’s cannon should remind us of Everyday Church and its digital mission, as we broadcast the seeds of the Gospel to places that seem impossible to reach, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Reaching homes, workplaces, hospitals, care homes, prisons, and more… and we have heard how some of those seeds have grown through Bijay & Joseph.

The Everyday Church Online venue has shown the impact and the need for our whole church to now be equipped and active together in our digital mission.

As part of our growing digital mission, we are going to:

• Enhance what is working well.
• Ensure Everyday Church’s digital strategy is well planned & working effectively.
• Empower and equip venues in maximising digital missional opportunities.
• Introduce new initiatives that will maintain and improve Everyday Church’s presence and digital missional effectiveness.

We will continue:

• Providing worship, teaching, prayer, and equipping for those who cannot gather with the church in a building.
• Giving the opportunity for people to respond to the gospel.
• Providing resource material to help people grow in God.
• Providing resource material for those who want to build local communities of faith in their location anywhere in the world.
• Providing prayer support across the globe.
• Signposting new believers and seekers to Everyday Church’s physical venues and to other local churches across the nation and the nations.
• Working with other churches in providing gospel hooks for those who are seeking meaning through the internet.

To be equipped and resourced for digital mission we have:

• Website – level 1 information

• App – level 2 information

• ChurchSuite – level 3 information

• Blogsite

• YouTube

• Podcasts

• Social Media
  We have 3 main profiles for you to follow, share, post, and interact with:

Research has discovered that …

 
But seriously, scripture is clear that we should take every opportunity and use every method available to preach the gospel and digital mission is full of both.

What might we do both personally and as a whole church?

We need to overcome some challenges and understand that technology is not good or bad, it is neutral. However, we must recognise that the companies that use the technology are not neutral. We are not neutral, we are human, and we are imperfect.

How do we navigate the digital world?

It is all about content, our digital consumption, and digital production.

If we want to avoid the dangers of the digital world we need to regularly reflect on the quantity and the quality of our digital consumption.

• The average adult looks at their phone every 12 minutes.
• 40% of adults look at their phone within 5 minutes of waking up.
• We spend on average 70 days a year looking at our phones.
• 7-16 year olds spend just under 4 hours on the internet every day.
• 42% of British adults identify with nomophobia.
• Nomophobia - the fear of being stuck without mobile phone connectivity.
  
  

The first and fundamental thing we can all do about mitigating the potential harm of the digital world is to reduce our amount of time we spend on our phones and other devices. By reducing the volume of consumption, we are forced to consider the quality of what we are consuming. Treat time like money – it is limited. When we realise it is limited, we actually begin to think about what we will spend it on.

We become what we behold. Jesus' words in the first century are confirmed by neuroscientists in the 21st century. What we consume, and what we watch, impacts how we think. How we think about the world. How we think about ourselves.

Words are powerful. Sung words are even more powerful (they connect with both sides of the brain). Moving images, plus words, plus music are the most powerful of all. They turn on all parts of our brain and cause maximum absorption of information.

It matters what we are viewing because there are messages being communicated that we are not even aware of. It is a biblical truth and a neurological reality that what we absorb consciously and subconsciously through the media is shaping our identity and our thought patterns.

We need to choose whether we are going to be intentional about what we consume, or passive absorbers of whatever the world wants to throw at us. We make this decision with an awareness that the media itself is slowly making it harder for us to make that decision for ourselves.

Avoiding the pitfalls of the digital world is not just about consumption, it is also about production, what we produce. Anyone who has hit send on a poorly worded email, or liked a post without checking the source, is aware that digital communication is complicated. Digital communication is fast, it is easy, but it is rarely good communication.

As soon as you move from the purely factual: “see you outside the station at 10:00am”. It is devoid of nuance, sensitivity, or empathy and it is so easy to be misinterpreted, however many emojis you put in the message.

When Paul wrote these words to the Ephesian church he had no awareness of the digital world. But he knew the power of speech. He may also have been aware of the words of Socrates:

Paul’s words in Ephesians remind us that what we post, send, repost or Tweet will always have a wider audience than we might intend. We must think of those we are speaking to and those who might listen.

James, as well as reminding us of the power of the tongue in James 3, counsels us to be “slow to speak” and what good advice that is when it comes to social media. Don’t react, speak less, speak better.

The power of the tongue works both ways to build up and break down. Equally the more biblical truth and positive speak we put on our social media and through our digital communications the more there is for others to find.

So, when we are on our digital mission, don't react, speak less, speak better, and ensure we "do not let any unwholesome message come out of our keyboard, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who read it."