What Do You Do With Online Congregants After Church?
Why Virtual Coffee Hour Is the Best Thing I've Ever Done
Today we’re talking about something super specific, kind of niche, and fully fascinating—what happens with your online congregation after church is over? What do you do with those human beings on the other end of the livestream or YouTube chat once the benediction is said and the organ stops playing?
This is the kind of thing seminarians should spend a semester on.
Recently, I sat down (via Zoom, naturally) with Rev. Natalie Owens-Pike, Associate Pastor of Online Ministry at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. She does the same type of ministry I do at Riverside—just in a different zip code. We compared notes on what we’re both doing in this post-worship space and how we’re trying to build real, lasting community for our online folks. Spoiler alert: we’re still figuring it out.
From Coffee Hour to Conversation to Connection
At Riverside, we’ve been doing Virtual Coffee Hour for a while—since 2020, actually, though the roots go back to a crazy idea from 2018 about putting a screen in the physical coffee hour room so people could Zoom into it.
(Yes, we wanted people sitting in South Hall wearing headphones talking to people at home. Yes, this would have gone poorly.)
Flash-forward to now—every Sunday after worship I hop on Zoom, and we chat, catch up, reflect on the sermon, and most weeks we have the preacher join us. It’s like a live, interactive talkback where the digital congregation gets face time with the preacher. Real, actual face time. We’re talking 25 minutes with the senior minister. That’s more than most in-person folks get unless Jill is willing to skip brunch and stand in the nave for an hour.
The real dream: to make online space its own intentional space. Not a scaled-down copy of the in-person experience. Something designed for online, by online.
Fifth Ave’s “Sermon Springboard”: Like Coffee Hour, But With Purpose
Now over at Fifth Ave, Natalie is running Sermon Springboard, which started out as online coffee hour but evolved into something more like a small group or mini spiritual formation experience after worship.
It happens on Zoom, right after the livestream ends. They split into breakout rooms. There’s a guiding question. Discussions happen. The conversation is structured (no small task on Zoom). It ends in prayer. And, very importantly, they’ve embraced the fact that this isn’t just chit-chat. It’s worship’s afterparty—not just weather talk over lukewarm coffee. The name reflects that: it’s not coffee hour, it’s a springboard.
That’s good ministry branding right there.
The way Natalie described it, people are actually digging into the sermon, naming questions and insights, and reflecting on how it connects to their week. They end in prayer. There’s a rhythm. They’ve got a culture.
What We’re Learning (Or, Mistakes We’re Trying Not to Repeat)
Things I know now:
Structure helps. Online spaces don’t work well on pure vibes alone.
Relationships matter. People show up not just for content but connection.
Volunteer leadership is the future. The dream is not being the only one running this. If that’s happening, it might be a sign something’s off.
And this: The online congregation needs dedicated space—not the scraps after the in-person folks have finished up. If 95% of church life is designed with one group in mind, it’s okay to have one thing that speaks directly to the digital folks.
Natalie and I both want to keep evolving our spaces. She’s thinking about building a volunteer team who can host and lead. I want to lean into more breakout rooms, even if it means sacrificing some preacher time. We may even steal each other’s ideas (respectfully, of course).
What About You?
If you’ve read this far, you might be a pastor, digital minister, or a super committed church nerd (I see you, fellow church nerds). So I’m curious: what do you do with your online congregation after worship? Do you do anything at all? Are you spinning wheels or seeing real fruit start to emerge?
Leave a comment and share your ideas so we can all learn from and with one another.
I really like this idea. If we did something like this, I would like to call it "The Afterglow," something like that. It could be very meaningful for those who are unable to attend church due to illness, distance, new job hours, etc. But before starting a "ministry" like this, I would like to define its purpose and determine how we can tell if it's working (or successful). What do you think?