The calendar is about to flip. New year, new budget cycle, new excuses to keep doing what you’ve always done — or a real opportunity to finally get serious about digital ministry. Before you coast into 2023 on autopilot, here are five things every church leader and digital missionary needs to have on their radar.
1. Digital Is No Longer a Backup Plan
COVID made digital ministry feel like an emergency measure. A lot of churches treated it like a generator — something you pull out when the power goes out. That season is over. People are not waiting for permission to live their spiritual lives online. They already are.
The question heading into 2023 is not “should we have a digital strategy?” It’s “are we intentional enough to actually make disciples there?” Streaming a Sunday service is not digital ministry. It’s digital broadcasting. There’s a difference, and 2023 is the year to close the gap.
Practical step: Audit your current digital touchpoints. List every platform, every channel, every online group. For each one, ask honestly — does this move someone toward Jesus, or does it just move content toward eyeballs?
2. Attention Is Fragmenting Faster Than Ever
TikTok rewired the internet. Short-form vertical video is not a trend — it’s the new default. At the same time, long-form content (podcasts, YouTube deep dives, newsletters) is thriving for people who want to go deep. The middle is collapsing. Mediocre content that’s not short enough to scroll and not deep enough to commit to is getting ignored.
Church leaders need to make a choice: go wide with short-form discovery content, or go deep with discipleship-focused long-form. Ideally, both — but they serve different purposes.
Practical step: Pick one short-form platform (Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts) and commit to 90 days of consistent posting. Measure reach, not likes. Then build a funnel from that content into something deeper — a group, a podcast, a course.
3. Community Is the Product
People are lonelier than ever. The data is not subtle about this. And loneliness is a discipleship opportunity that most churches are completely underutilizing in digital spaces.
The churches winning in digital ministry in 2023 are not the ones with the best production. They’re the ones building the best communities. Discord servers. Facebook Groups. Private Slack channels. Spaces where people are known by name, checked on by a real human, and invited into something bigger than passive content consumption.
Jesus didn’t broadcast to the twelve. He did life with them. “As you go” (Matthew 28:19) works in digital spaces too — if you’re actually going somewhere people gather, not just publishing and hoping.
Practical step: Launch or revitalize one digital community space in Q1. Set a simple goal: every new member gets a personal welcome message within 24 hours. See what happens to retention.
4. The Metaverse Is Not Dead — It’s Just Early
Yes, Meta had a rough year. Yes, the memes were brutal. But dismissing the metaverse because of one company’s stock price is like dismissing the internet in 1996 because your dial-up kept dropping.
Platforms like VRChat, Roblox, Horizon Worlds, and others already have millions of daily users — many of them young, many of them spiritually curious, almost none of them sitting in a church pew. Digital missionaries are already planting churches there. The question is whether your church will show up before or after everyone else finally admits it matters.
Practical step: Spend one hour this month exploring a metaverse platform with no agenda except curiosity. What do you notice? Who’s there? What are they looking for?
5. Decentralization Is the Future of Church Multiplication
The old model: build a big church, plant a daughter church, repeat slowly. The emerging model: equip individuals to become digital missionaries and release them into the networks they already inhabit.
This is the heartbeat of what the DigitalChurch.Network is building — organic, decentralized expressions of church that don’t require a building, a budget, or a seminary degree to launch. It requires calling, a little training, and a community to shepherd.
The most scalable discipleship strategy in 2023 is not a better church app. It’s releasing more people to make disciples in the digital spaces they already occupy.
Practical step: Identify three people in your congregation who are already digitally active and spiritually mature. Have a conversation about what it would look like for them to lead something — a group, a channel, a community — where they already have influence.
Your Next Step
Don’t let 2023 be another year of digital drift. Pick one of these five areas, write it on a whiteboard, and make it a priority for Q1. Then come back and tell us what happened.
Subscribe to the TCD Podcast for weekly conversations on digital ministry, discipleship, and what it looks like to follow Jesus on the internet — wherever that takes you.
