The Three R's of Preaching as Digital Ministry

Repurpose + Replicate + Reimagine

I’m thinking a lot about preaching these days. I’m wrapping up two sermons that I’m preaching in the next three weeks. I host a weekly sermon prep conversation with the Senior Minister at The Riverside Church. I host a sermon talkback every Sunday in Virtual Coffee Hour. I have friends scheming gatherings that will help us explore this craft in new and necessary ways (more on that in the coming months!). And then there’s this little project I’m producing, Bible in a Minute, which is one part education and a whole lot of parts preaching. (But then again, when isn’t preaching also education?!)

With all this preaching pondering, I’ve naturally let my mind drift to what it means to preach in digital spaces. And for today, I want to share the three R’s of preaching as digital ministry: repurpose, replicate, reimagine.

Repurpose

If you find yourself stepping in to a physical pulpit on a regular basis, then it is essential that you are repurposing that preaching moment into ways people can experience it in digital spaces.

Yes, this can be as simple as livestreaming your worship service and publishing just the sermon to YouTube (with an intentional title and thumbnail!) so that people can encounter it. And yes, you should drop that sermon video into OpusClip or another platform that generates shortform clips from your longform video, and then publish 2-3 of them (or more?!) on Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. And then perhaps you even squeeze that sermon and all your hours of prep a bit more, like we do at Riverside, and you host some sort of sermon prep conversation — it could be on IG Live or a Zoom call or a podcast — as well as a sermon talkback. Why spend all that time planning and prepping just for a twenty minutes experience? Repurpose the entire process, especially as it can become more accessible and engaging in digital spaces.

This is an easy way to take what you’re already doing and with little extra effort and intentionality allow your preaching to be repurposed in nearly a dozen digital spaces.

Replicate

An easy (and necessary) first step is to repurpose what you’re already doing. But a next step you can take, requiring a bit more effort and intentionality, is to replicate the preaching experience specifically for these digital spaces.

Essentially, take the sermon you are prepared to preach in the room and preach it directly to a camera, recording the sermon to publish or even going live in that very moment. One thing I think you will quickly find is that you show up differently as a preacher when you enter this “digital only” environment. How do you preach when you can’t see the faces of the people you are preaching to? What does it mean to give and receive energy in this modality?

If you give this a try week after week, you might find yourself crafting the sermon specifically for this experience, allowing you to step into your digital pulpit and broadcast your message for the whole world wide web. You’re simply taking the thing you already do and offering it in a different space, replicating the preaching we are all used to in a digital environment. Rather than making your online community peek in through the windows to watch the sermon happen in another room, you are bringing the same sermon to their particular online context.

Reimagine

Preaching as digital ministry doesn’t end with repurposing and replicating. The next, and perhaps most necessary step is to reimagine what it means to preach for this particular online context.

The environment shapes the experience — it always has!

Imagine you step into a lofted pulpit in a grand cathedral. How do you show up as a preacher? Or you stand behind a music stand in a school cafetorium (yes, I said “cafetorium). How do you show up as a preacher? Or you are sitting around a campfire, encircled by trees. How do you show up as a preacher? Or a small, countryside church building. How do you show up as a preacher?

The environment always impacts the experience. Why should this be any different for digital spaces?

Rather than simply replicating (or regurgitating) the preaching of our past in digital spaces, what might it look like to reimagine the entire preaching experience with the digital context in mind?

What does it mean to see TikTok, Reels, and Shorts as a pulpit? How might longer YouTube videos be an opportunity to preach with more than just your face on screen and your words filling the speakers? Could a written medium (like Substack!) be a pulpit in which you are called to stand and proclaim the good news? What message is being shared with the images you post on Instagram, the updates you share on Threads, and all the digital spaces we inhabit?

These are the questions with no definitive answer. These are the pulpits of the future that we are still building, filled with trials and errors and perhaps even successes along the way.

It is this question — how might preaching be reimagined for digital spaces — that led me to produce Bible in a Minute, a daily short form video project that covers every chapter of the Bible, one day at a time. Yes, this project offers a unique educational overview of the whole Bible (we’re currently working our way through Nehemiah) but more than just sixty second versions of “Crash Course the Bible” (hey John Green, this should totally be a thing!), Bible in a Minute is a digital pulpit filled with a diversity of preachers, modeling what it means to read and interpret the Bible from a progressive and liberative point of view. If a sermon could find its way into the palm of your hand as you’re standing in the checkout line or waiting for the train, it might look something like this.

All this to say, repurposing the sermon you are already preaching and replicating it for digital spaces is a good and necessary place to start. But the next and most needed step is to reimagine what preaching might be given the ever emerging and evolving landscape that is the internet and digital spaces.

What about you?

How are you utilizing these three R’s of preaching for digital ministry? Leave a comment or send me an email and let me know. I would love to see what you’re up to and talk with you more about how we are continuing to build and step into these pulpits of the future.

Hey, thanks for reading all the way to the very end! Did you know that this article is also up as a video? (I replicated the article as video!) Click here to watch me talk about all these ideas and pretend to be John Green!

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