Case Study
Alongside roles in churches and educational organizations, over the years, I have worked independently as a faith-based educational media producer and researcher. My mission is to help faith and faith-adjacent communities understand and develop innovative learning opportunities for the people they serve.
Some notable projects I’ve worked on include:
- Becoming Tapestry, my dissertation study of a creative foster youth mentoring community;
- The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry, a spiritual formation podcast for the Episcopal Church and beyond;
- Liturgy Illuminated, illustrated playing cards for teaching Christian worship practices;
- Called to Transformation, an online asset-based community development training offered by the Episcopal Church and Episcopal Relief & Development; and
- Creative Commons Prayer, a crowdsourced collection of multimedia prayer prompts to reuse and remix.
I’m currently writing A (Christian) Formation Playbook, a weekly newsletter for church leaders and others interested in playful approaches to spiritual learning and growth. In this post, I’m going to include publishing for websites and email newsletters as an extension of social media ministry, for reasons I hope will become clear.
Social networks and digital media offer churches valuable opportunities to nurture connection. We are called by Christ to be present as witnesses to Love wherever people gather for fun and fellowship, for lament and mutual support. I have grown in my faith and friendships amid digital community in the era of social media, and I’ve watched others do the same.
However, I’ve also become increasingly frustrated by how the profit motives of Big Tech have distorted the pro-social mission these companies originally pursued. As tech reporter David Pierce has put it, “the ‘social media’ era is giving way to the ‘media with a comments section’ era, and everything is an entertainment platform now.”
In the mid-2010s, a pastor might reasonably have expected to log on and be able to offer caring attention to neighbors and parishioners sharing details about their lives on personal blogs or social networks. They might not have found all of their flock, but it did feel like a lot of us were gathering in this way. But scrolling fatigue, ethical scandals, political polarization, the decline of the Open Web, and the proliferation of AI slop are changing how people engage online.
I believe a big part of what faith leaders have to offer online today is a commitment to facilitating healthy, human-scale community and modeling spiritually wise digital habits.
1. Take back your connections. My friend and colleague Sarah Lefton, a Jewish religious educator who used to run a popular YouTube channel, once told me she feared that creating content according to the changing demands of the video-sharing platform wasn’t “for the better of humanity.” Over the years, I’ve increasingly come to a similar conclusion. The most important change I’ve made to ensure that my followers see my content has been transitioning from creating web content and then sharing it on social media to writing an email newsletter that then also gets published online—and, yes, includes a comments section. I chose the platform Ghost in part because I control my own subscriber list. Now I get to ask myself the question “What content will best serve my subscribers?” rather than “What content will best serve the interests of the social media companies, so that their algorithms might show it to my followers?”
2. Use your voice, not the crowd’s. Because social media platforms are filling up with AI slop, it’s more refreshing than ever to read, hear, or watch people sharing unique and even quirky perspectives. I do my best not to over-edit my wordy, nerdy, professionally restless take on the intersection of learning, faith, and media. I hope that you’ll do likewise in whatever ways God is calling you to serve in the vineyard. I believe this approach will help our work stand out against the background of computer-generated noise.
3. Ask for feedback more regularly. Part of what makes social media fun and powerful is the near-instant feedback we receive via post engagement—comments, likes, and shares. As I try to rely less on social media posting and more on sending original media directly to subscribers’ inboxes, I’m finding myself drawn to more frequent surveys and one-on-one requests for reader input.
If I sound a little frustrated at the state of social media today, it’s because I was so involved in and inspired by the period when it was a genuinely positive force in the connectedness of faith communities. I am more convinced than ever of the power of online community, even as changes in these platforms have made community somewhat harder to convene and maintain. So I would say that the changes I have witnessed in myself are a deepening resolve to find new ways to connect. Increasingly, that means swimming against the current of how the algorithms are trying to direct our behavior.
There are also habits that I, and so many of our faith communities, have developed during this time that I think are entirely to the good. The social media era has taught us:
- to be more intentional about and commit more resources to church communications;
- to embrace informality, transparency, and even redundancy in our mission of spreading a good word;
- to remember the importance of having fun together;
- and, most of all, to explore our social worlds widely and value the unprecedented access we have to a huge cross-section of human perspectives on life, faith, values, and the common good.
I genuinely believe that over the past fifteen years or so, many faith communities have come to appreciate the importance of the message we have to share about the God of hope, and to lean into the joys and challenges we share with other congregations in our denomination and beyond. As we continue to find ways for media to help us feel less alone and catalyze mutual care and affection, we can trust that the Holy Spirit continues to move in the digital world in ways that will help us grow in our knowledge of God’s unchanging love.
Here are several places you can find me online: