Convening Hybrid and Digital Community
Ability to bring together groups online and help them flourish as communities—learning from, supporting, and otherwise engaging with each other. These are “Art of Hosting”-type skills applied online. An example might be forming an online Bible study group where there is broad participation and a sense of momentum and focus.
Research Interview Excerpts
What did the experts say?
“I can have students straight out of college who hate technology because their only experience of it is the worst elements … They never learned how to be a part of real conversations. They never learned how to shape relationships … and so they are deeply almost scarred by it, right?”
“When I’ve talked with pastors who’ve taken the lead and tried to do more digital presence with their congregations, it’s almost always positive. A sense of, ‘It really made me feel connected to my parishioners, or my parishioners feel connected to me in a new way,’ or, ‘I watched other parishioners connect with each other.'”
“The age old question [is] how do you get people to engage? Just because it’s easy to engage doesn’t mean that people will and it doesn’t mean that they will consistently. If you’re developing a digital strategy as part of your adult ed program or whatever, the question remains, how do you get people to buy-in? When there’s no real carrot and there’s no real stick, how do you get them to really be engaged?”
REAL WORLD EXAMPLES
#Slate Speak
A signature offering/gathering of The Slate Project online community. This regular Twitter chat gets people around the world talking about big questions in faith and society through radical openness and participatory leadership. VISITEXPLORE RESOURCES FOR CONVENING

Foundational Research Now Published
The research upon which this website is based now appears in multiple peer-reviewed journals!
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“Reassessing Embodiment” Amid Pandemic
Stacy and Kyle being present to their congregations during Covid-19 lockdown. Digital
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Bad Girls of the Bible: Jigsaw Activity
Judy Fentress-WilliamsSarah Stonesifer This assignment is part of the Bad Girls of the Bible
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Bad Girls of the Bible: Online Course
Are you curious about how to design and facilitate an entirely online course? This guide offers a
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Crowdfunding for Congregations and Nonprofits
This guidebook by Adam J. Copeland introduces the concept of crowdfunding, explains trends in
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Digital Storytelling Process Walkthrough
Digital storytelling brings together words, pictures, and sounds in an online video or other digital
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Sifting New Media Demographics
Demographics aren’t destiny, but they are important for ministers to understand.This simple
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A Case Study in Online Community
This classroom activity about online community by Kyle Oliver provides that important but often
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