Blog
Aug 5, 2025
How to Minister in a Hybrid World: Opportunities and Challenges for Churches
A Time of Disruption
Imagine your church somehow existed back in the 16th century, at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. You would be surrounded by major changes in society, in religious and political institutions, and in communication. The power structures of church and state would have been in turmoil and chaos. The established role and norms of the church were being upended. The printing press threatened to destabilize how theology was done, how people related to Scripture, and how information was shared generally. The world was turning upside down.
Thank goodness we don’t have to pastor through that kind of upheaval, right?
Except… we do.
The religious landscape in the 21st century is vastly different from the 16th. However, church and society are facing shifts in technology and communication on the order of magnitude of the printing press. We are living in the early stages of a technological revolution that will shape the future of religion.
We cannot know all of the impending impacts of the Internet, of social media, and of mass digital communication. Technology continues to accelerate, and we may often feel overwhelmed. The COVID-19 pandemic turbocharged this trajectory, and if the past five years are any indication, the decades to come hold yet more change.
In this uncertainty and ongoing transformation, what are we ministers to do?
Living in a Hybrid Reality
More and more of our lives, our relationships, and our churches now exist in a hybrid reality. By hybrid, I mean they integrate offline and online realities constantly and seamlessly. Our interactions begin in one sphere and weave back and forth through the other, pulling our email threads and coffee shops and Zoom meetings and pastoral visits and text messages and Sunday services closer and closer together.
This may be disconcerting or even frightening; new technologies always seem to bring problems along with solutions, anxieties of what will go wrong along with hopes for what may now be possible. But our offline and online interactions in ministry, in worship, and in discipleship need not be at odds.
We now live in an economy that capitalizes on human attention, where a constant bombardment of incendiary content and monetized preoccupation threatens our humanity with distraction, alienation, and objectification. This may feed into our sense of shame and disconnection, as we wrestle with the problems these new media present and our own dependence on those media. Whether through doomscrolling on a smartphone or an endless news cycle, most of us have experienced the fragmenting of our attention and the dulling of our hope for the sake of profit.
Our Opportunity
But the church has an opportunity in this cultural moment, as well. We are invited to witness to the goodness of God and the loving call of Christ to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. We can subvert the powers and principalities of our day—forces of distraction, alienation, and objectification—through genuine worship, connection, and care. And, as the church has done through the millennia using Roman roads that carried apostolic letters, the printing press that spread the Scriptures, and radio and television broadcasts that reached new audiences, we can discern how best to utilize the tools and opportunities available to us.
The church needs to face this new day with eyes open, ready to respond to the invitation of the Holy Spirit animating our communities. If our hybrid world incorporates offline and online relationships, our discipleship and worship should extend to these parts of our lives as well, as we offer our whole selves to God.
The goal of hybrid ministry is not “going viral” or achieving TikTok stardom – the goal is to love God and our neighbors well in all of life, offline and online. You don’t need to be a social media genius to minister to your people, but it can be valuable to ask how you can use technologies (new or old) to do so. Digital media aren’t just tools for church growth or evangelism; they make up an environment we all interact with daily.
Our discipleship invites us to ask how that environment forms or malforms us, and what following Christ looks like in a world that includes not just printed books, radio, and television, but also the Internet and social media. Technology will keep accelerating and changing; some of these inventions and trends will last, and others will not. The task for ministers is to reflect theologically in ways that equip us to respond well to these changing circumstances over the years.
The past five years have highlighted important questions for churches, ministers, and theologians to consider. As we reckon with the ways that our worship has already changed, and may continue to change, we need to revisit some of our assumptions and comfortable practices:
What does it mean to facilitate genuine participation in worship and faith formation, when our cultural current drags us toward consumerism?
How can we value human embodiment in a world of digital communication, and are there ways our established norms fell short?
How do media and mediation impact or inflect our worship, our relationships, and our faith?
What does a clear-eyed discernment of reality look like amid virtual platforms and connections?
These categories of activity, embodiment, mediation, and virtuality will be important for the church throughout the rest of the 21st century.
Keeping Our Eyes Open
We also would do well to learn from others. The church is often not the most effective early adopter of new technologies. As we encounter communicators and communities that are making good use of these tools, it will behoove us to bring curiosity to the ways they connect, even if it means learning from people with whom we have theological differences.
Our congregations are, more and more, hybrid communities made up of individuals who move through a hybrid world. The online and the offline bleed into one another, and it is no longer helpful to try to separate them fully. But there is hope as well; hope that the Bride of Christ has faced many changes, and that she has never done so alone. Above all, we must remember the presence of God, who is our hope. God is with us, whether we connect across a table, through the printed page preserving millennia of the Scriptural witness and church tradition, or via a Zoom Bible study or livestreamed worship service.
If all this upheaval feels at times like it’s just too much, be encouraged – you are still your people’s pastor, and they want and need you to walk with them as your church seeks Christ together.