A recent webinar I attended explored the church’s pastoral and missional responses to developments in digital technologies and social media.¹ The webinar was of great interest to me—not least because a colleague and I had just completed teaching a final-year MDiv capstone course entitled “The People of God at the Intersection of Physical and Virtual Space”.?

I left the webinar full of new insights drawn especially from the keynote speaker, Natchi Lazarus. Amongst the things mentioned that caused me to pause and reflect included his statements about how people come to the virtual world with a desire for expression, experience, and community.?

One reason why I particularly warmed up to points made about expression, experience, and community is because a lot of work I do at SBC deals with designing learning experiences. Instead of defaulting to the ‘talking-head’ learning experience, I have been challenging students to think of themselves instead as designers of learning experiences. Defaulting to the talking-head allows only the teacher to dictate and dominate. Becoming a designer of learning places focus on the learner, forces changes in teacher intuitions, and births learner-focused expression, experience, and community. ? ?

While a large part of my work at SBC in the pre-COVID years focused on designing face-to-face learning experiences, COVID-19 forced a hurried migration into virtual spaces. Having now spent many hours exploring and experimenting with platforms and tools in the virtual world, I can only conclude that there is an amazing array of them out there. Whether your learning style leans toward visual, aural, verbal, physical, logical, social, or solitary,² there are a plethora of platforms and tools out there which offer deeply meaningful and memorable expression, experience, and community.

In working out design steps, I have developed eight aspects to consider when designing online learning experiences:?

1. Audience: Who’s participating?
2. Advancements: What are the innovations out there??
3. Affordances: What can the technologies do?
4. Architecture: How is the ‘built environment’?(setting) designed? ?
5. Aesthetics: What’s the look and feel of the?interface and assets used??
6. Agency: Who can be an active participant?
7. Adoption: How ready are the participants to embrace change? Or are they resistant to change?
8. Audition: What tools, platforms, and assets should be used? Why?

These design considerations force my students to broaden their thinking when entering into virtual worlds. From my observations, too many in Christian ministry develop their web presence poorly. They seem quite unaware about how the Web has evolved from Web 1.0 to Web 5.0.³ In that respect, they remain like missionaries entering a new field with little understanding of the culture and its practices.?

While social practices in virtual worlds have been totally reordered, with look-and-feel transformed and new literacies developed, Christian ministry responses have remained rather unimaginative. Habits and intuitions of leaders don’t seem to be aligned with web culture. There seems a failure to recognize that the new currency you need in order to maintain credible presence in the virtual world include reputation, ratings, recommendations, reviews, reciprocity, responsiveness, and resonance.?

One of the critical considerations for promoting expression, experiences, and community is active participation or agency. Who can be an active participant in the 90-minute experience you offer to your participants??

In a Zoom classroom, the teacher is often the active participant while the students remain passive and powered down. Breakout rooms reverse the order as students become active participants while the teacher remains passive and powered down. But what if learning experiences can err on the side of students being very active and engaged? Given the many web platforms and collaborative tools which allow for active participation, self-expression, and co-creation, what can church leaders do to foster moments on the web which have strong expression, experience, and community elements?

In the rest of this article, I want to share three browser-based platforms that I have explored with students and the team of instructional designers at SBC. These are Miro, Gather, and BandLab.?

Miro is a collaborative whiteboard which allows participants from any part of the world to gather as equals. The strength of Miro lies in its templates and tools which allow participants to organize their ideas visually. Some of the best features include the many graphic organizers, ice-breaker activities, and colourful sticky notes, as well as the ability to embed weblinks and videos, import images, upload PDF files, extract pages from PDF documents, and set a timer with background music.?

Using Miro, students have been able to explore biblical texts and assigned readings, post pictures of clay art sessions, share their favourite worship songs, offer responses to others’ pictures and posts, and participate in ice-breakers, art therapy, brainstorming sessions, and so on.

Gather, on the other hand, is a browser-based gathering space which has the look-and-feel of a retro 8-bit video game. While there are templates for office rooms, meeting rooms, events, and social experiences, any gathering space is fully customizable and can be tailored to mirror familiar settings. Because Gather incorporates your computer video camera and microphone, you are able to communicate to all participants without additional video conferencing software.

Some of the best features include entering the Gather space and moving around as customizable avatars, embedding and interacting with weblinks and everyday objects, playing games with fellow participants, having conversations in private spaces, and entering portals which transport you to a different space—just like the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia!

Using Gather, students have been able to participate in virtual exhibitions, host meetings in luxury hotel settings, take a virtual tour of SBC, experience virtual church, travel along the route that Paul and Barnabas took on their missionary journeys, participate in a virtual escape room, and so on.

Finally, BandLab is a collaborative digital audio workstation (DAW) which has soundbanks and music-making tools with which to create music tracks. DAWs are typically used by musicians who want to produce music on their computers. Because it is browser-based, BandLab provides a platform and tools for real-time and remote collaborations amongst multiple participants.?

While BandLab is a platform slanted toward musicians, its use is not confined to the world of music making. While I have explored BandLab’s use for music making with seniors, music ministry amongst Thai youth, digital music production with Myanmese refugee youths, online music therapy, and sonic arts with migrant workers, I have also explored its use in the context of doing Bible study with oral-preference learners.⁴ Specifically, SBC students have used BandLab to do group oral performances of selected psalms. Through the process of reading, reciting, and learning how to express emotions through with words, facial expressions, and hand gestures, students have developed a much deeper appreciation for the psalms.

Having provided a brief description of the three platforms, their features, and a selection of use cases, it leaves me only to draw attention to the rich experiences offered by the platforms and tools. While what is common to all platforms is multi-user access, each platform has its unique affordances and tools that the others don’t offer. That being the case, each platform offers a unique opportunity for interactive, collaborative, and participatory learning experiences.

The work of seminaries like SBC has always been to strengthen and support the worship, nurture, and outreach life of the church. As everyday life becomes more and more played out across an expanded ecosystem of physical and virtual spaces, it behoves the church to be more aware of platforms and tools which offer rich expression, experience, and community.?

Christian presence in virtual spaces is a matter of pastoral responsibility and missional imperative requiring a reorientation of leadership intuitions and habits. Will we make time and effort to explore, experiment, and reimagine our responses?

For Discussion

1. What steps can you take to develop familiarity and expertise with web platforms and tools which promote user expression, experience, and community??
2. Brainstorm with your ministry team as many web-platform use cases as you can think of to extend the worship, nurture, and outreach life of the church. ?

Weblinks are correct at the time of printing.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H0xpc93hV4
2. https://www.inspireeducation.net.au/blog/the-seven-learning-styles/
3. https://networlding.com/the-advent-of-web-5-0/
4. https://thegroup.sg/2021/10/03/the-digital-music-world-a-lesser-explored-pastoral-and-missional-frontier/