The Church Has Always Needed a Few Crazy Ones
There’s a pattern in Scripture that nobody puts on motivational posters. God keeps picking the wrong people. A stuttering shepherd. A teenage girl. A murderer-turned-missionary. People who looked at the status quo and said, essentially, this isn’t enough.
The digital missionaries showing up in your church right now? They’re next in that line.
Who Are We Talking About?
You know them. Maybe you are them.
They’re the one who keeps asking why the sermon isn’t on YouTube yet. The volunteer who built a Facebook Group for your small group and watched it triple in size. The staff member floating ideas about Discord servers and TikTok accounts while everyone else is still debating whether the church website needs a refresh.
They’re the online church advocate. The digital discipleship champion. The bleeding-edge tech person doing virtual ministry inside physical buildings.
They see a congregation of 200 on Sunday morning and a potential congregation of 20,000 every other hour of the week — and they cannot stop thinking about the gap.
They do “church” differently. Not because they hate the building. Because they love the mission.
What The Institution Does With Them
Let’s be honest. The church doesn’t always know what to do with these people.
You can challenge them — bring up theology, tradition, the importance of embodied community. They’ll engage you seriously and come back the next week with better answers.
You can disregard them — table their proposals, lose their emails, quietly pull their budget. They’ll find another way.
You can praise them — give them a shoutout, call them visionary in a staff meeting, then change nothing. They’ll smile politely and keep working.
You can pacify them — give them a small corner of the ministry with zero support and call it “the digital team.” They’ll build something anyway.
About the only thing you cannot do is ignore them forever. Because the world is moving. The mission field has migrated online. And eventually, even the most traditional institution has to reckon with where the people actually are.
These leaders aren’t going away. Neither is the internet.
Why They’re Not Actually Crazy
Here’s the reframe: the “crazy” label is always assigned by people defending a center that’s already shifting.
When the printing press arrived, someone in the church thought it was crazy to put Scripture in the hands of ordinary people. When radio came, someone thought it was crazy to broadcast a sermon to people who weren’t in the room. Every generation has its moment where the mission and the medium create friction — and every generation has a few people willing to push through it.
Digital discipleship isn’t a trend. It’s a territory. Billions of people spend hours every day in digital spaces — processing their doubts, forming their identities, looking for community and meaning. The question isn’t should the church be there. The question is will your church be there.
The crazy ones already know the answer.
What They Actually Need From You
If you’re a church leader reading this, here’s the practical truth: you don’t have to become a digital native. You just have to stop being a gatekeeper.
Give them permission. Formal, explicit, public permission. Not a vague “yeah, try some stuff.” Put it in a job description. Name it in a sermon. Signal to the whole church that digital ministry is real ministry.
Give them a budget. Even a small one. A few hundred dollars for tools, training, or ads changes everything. It tells them you’re serious.
Give them accountability and autonomy. Set goals together — people reached, disciples made, conversations started. Then get out of the way and let them experiment. Digital ministry moves fast. Slow approval chains kill momentum.
Give them community. Connect them with other digital missionaries. (That’s a big part of what we do at TCD.) Isolation makes the crazy ones burn out. Community makes them unstoppable.
What They Need To Remember
And if you are one of the crazy ones — if you’re the digital discipleship person in a church that doesn’t quite get it yet — hear this:
The frustration is real. The slow pace is maddening. But you are not alone, and you are not wrong.
You’re operating from a conviction that God can use a Wi-Fi connection to change a life. That a comment reply can be pastoral care. That a YouTube sermon can reach someone who would never walk through a church door.
That conviction isn’t arrogance. It’s faith applied to the moment you’re actually living in.
The people crazy enough to believe God can use them to make disciples online are the ones who will actually do it.
Your Next Step
Don’t just feel inspired — move. This week, identify one digital ministry experiment you’ve been sitting on and bring it to a leader with a one-page plan. Keep it simple: the problem, the opportunity, the ask. Start the conversation.
The mission is waiting. Log on.
