Entrepreneurial Christian leaders and thoughtful evangelists rightly keep a close eye on new forms of communication, always eager to find the most effective ways to reach people with the gospel of Jesus. But I have observed that ministry leadership teams often fail to understand the scale on which various media best operate.
“All the youth these days are on YouTube,” a keen youth or campus ministry leader observes. “YouTube is like the new Athenian marketplace and Areopagus. We need to meet the youth where they’re at. Look at how many hours our youth spend on YouTube and TikTok! We should start a channel!”
Time, energy, and perhaps even money, get poured into the endeavour. But chances are subscribers are low, and views even lower. It’s likely that many of the subscribers are the leader’s Facebook friends and those they went through Bible College with.
Getting Media Wrong
There are a range of ways we can get media wrong. We can fail to understand the conventions of the medium. This can be as simple as using the technology incorrectly: getting public/private viewing settings wrong and inputting incorrect metadata. It can be failing to pay proper attention to quality, as expected on the medium—image and sound and presentation quality, for example. It can also be the more sophisticated failure to understand the effective use of visuals, humour, and search-and-algorithm-friendly thumbnails, titles and tags; the failure to post frequently and cross-promote wherever possible.
You can’t just plop an evangelist in front of a microphone and a camera and get a good outcome. You can’t just pay a marketing company to build you a truly meaningful social media strategy and expect it to have longevity. To both authentically and effectively use any new medium, you need the expertise to understand it and the talent to harness it—or the discipline and resources to develop those two things. With the exception of media companies, it is rarely a church or organisation’s blog or YouTube channel or podcast that builds a large and passionate following. It is the work of creative, qualified, magnetic and skilful individuals that succeeds.
We can be naïve—like when someone declares they are going to create a ‘viral campaign’, as if such a thing can be engineered in advance, especially by a small organisation. We can also illegitimately hijack a medium in a way that does not engage: just because youth happily watch people playing Minecraft for hours, doesn’t mean they have any interest in watching someone talk about the Bible for hours—one is recreation, the other is education.[1]
Lastly, there can be deeper moral and ethical failures that come from us not thinking with a theologically critical framework about the platform itself. We need to apply both a 1 Corinthians 9 ‘all things to all people’ approach and a 1 Corinthians 1–2 ‘foolishness of the cross’ approach to all our gospel communication. If we are not careful we can be swept up in the unhealthy patterns that a medium encourages—as Jake Meador argues the ‘young, restless and Reformed’ Generation X pastors were in their use of the internet.
Understanding Scale
There is a reason why your ministry probably shouldn’t start a YouTube or a podcast or a TikTok: the question of scale. Some media naturally scale down to grassroots organisations. This is why Facebook proved so useful for everyday ministry in the 2010s: it worked well on a small and localised scale. One of the most significant early mainstream uses of podcasting was for church sermons. So also, for a short period, perhaps, church blogs replaced the weekly print newsletter (but by and large it seems that an email list proved more useful for this purpose).
By contrast, YouTube channels, blogs and the podcast proper have proved to be much less meaningful media for local ministries, especially as a means of reaching new people. The loyal core may engage, but I suspect, apart from occasional outlier testimonies, these platforms have not reached a wider audience.
Why not? Because these media bear some similarities to traditional print and broadcast media. They work better on a larger scale than a local church, ministry or community; and they work best when produced and promoted at a certain level of excellence (even if that excellence comes in lo-fi Generation Z shaky cam, no makeup, hair bun and tracksuit pants). If and when a local pastor’s blog or channel does become a national or international phenomenon, for that very reason it becomes a parachurch ministry, only tangentially connected to their work on the ground.
Furthermore, such media have a global reach. In many cases, content from other countries is just as relevant and significantly more appealing to Australian Christians than local offerings.
For that reason, these larger scale media should probably not be pursued for the benefit of local work, but for their own sake, and for the trickle-down blessing they will have on many many ministries. They are better for bigger-picture culture-making, thought-leading, resourcing and education than for direct growth strategies.[2]
Are We Willing to Become a Media Ministry?
If you really want to make an impact in this area, you need to be willing to make an organisational shift. Australian organisations who have been successful with podcasting and video content have done so because they have devoted a significant amount of time, money, expertise and staff time to becoming, at least in part, a media production company. Some examples that immediately come to my mind are The Gospel Coalition Australia, Reach Australia and City Bible Forum (and its Third Space ministry). Theological Colleges and Bible Colleges are also well positioned to invest in good quality media, because of their online learning work.
Local ministries who successfully produce a steady stream of short-form video content have likely been blessed with and supported someone who is especially inspired and motivated in this particular media ministry.
Other organisations are more fundamentally media organisations: such as The Centre for Public Christianity, Undeceptions or Christian radio and television stations. The recent announcement that the Bible Society is ending Eternity magazine highlights how costly it is to sustain such media ministry.
If your organisation doesn’t have the resources or the resolve to really do the work, I would advise against putting too much hope in dabbling in these platforms.
Support and Profile Existing Media Ministries and Individual Creators
Rather than assuming that your next strategic move is to start producing audio or video content on whatever platform and format, you should consider whether it might make more sense to curate existing media ministries that you could support and promote in your local ministry, or through your national denomination or parachurch.
This could include some of the organisations already mentioned in the previous section, international organisations such as Speak Life in the UK, or those individual content creators who have worked hard and gained an audience. Here in Australia, there are a range of pre-existing ministries run by an individual or small team. For video content, consider, for example, Dominic Steele’s The Pastor’s Heart or the Real Life Bible by Anglican Deaconess Ministries fellow Zoe Earnshaw.
Lastly, don’t forget to keep an ear out for the prolific bloggers, podcasters, vodcasters, TikTokkers or Instagrammers who are already in your midst. How can you meaningfully support them, and raise awareness of their work, where it makes the most sense to do so?
Your Ministry Probably Shouldn’t Bother Starting a YouTube or a TikTok. Rather than devoting organisational finances and attention to a new, and possibly ill-fated endeavour, it could very well be a much better gospel investment to support existing work that has proved its worth.
[1] For some specific recommendations about how to effectively use different online media, see this episode of The Pastor’s Heart.
[2] This is not to say that you should not use video content, especially TikTok/Stories-style short-form video, as a part of your regular promotions. The cultural norm of informal lo-fi video production makes this more accessible than ever for a small ministry to produce passable video content. Although, my hunch is that this is a nice-to-have, rather than a game-changer.
