Digital Media for Ministry: Mapping the Landscape

Are you forming students for culturally savvy ministry in a society shaped by new media? Do you want your students to feel theologically prepared and technically skilled for leading discussions on Facebook, preaching sermons on YouTube, and raising money on Indiegogo? And have you thought about what preparation they’ll need to learn the next generation of tools and platforms?

If so, a growing community of learners wants to hear and learn from you.

Ministers are Hungry

The e-Formation program of the Center for the Ministry of Teaching (CMT) at Virginia Theological Seminary has been awarded a grant from The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to connect with other theological educators engaged in digital media training and action research.

We held our first e-Formation Conference as a small pilot learning exchange among about forty friends and colleagues. Three years later, e-Formation 2016 brought together 250 participants in person and online.

At a time when calendars are full and continuing ed budgets are tight, that’s tremendous growth. It tells us that ministers are hungry for training, inspiration, and opportunities to reflect on how technology is changing their work.

Collective Efforts

Our yearly conference is just one component of a network of digital media for ministry training opportunities I have the privilege to lead. Collectively, these efforts comprise the e-Formation Learning Community. Others include

• regional e-Formation bootcamps, held previously in Phoenix, Alexandria, and New Orleans and currently booked for Chicago;
• fall hybrid faith formation cohorts that bring together congregation- and judicatory-based faith formation ministers for coaching and peer support in combining in-person and online Christian education models; and
• a credit-bearing digital media for ministry course for VTS and continuing education students, which filled in the spring of 2015 and will be offered again as a January intensive in 2016.

Mapping the Landscape

We think not teaching digital media skills today is like not teaching homiletics or pastoral care. Especially in the past year, we’ve been hearing about more and more colleagues who seem to agree with us. But we think this group is not yet the well connected community of practice that it could be.

To that end, we are engaged in an asset mapping project to identify and spread the word about digital media for ministry formation opportunities across the theological education landscape.

We want to connect with other schools in order to learn from them and, we hope, them from us. We want to help connect colleagues across the country with opportunities for hands-on training at nearby institutions. And we want to invite anyone who’d like to join us to become partners in empowering the growing e-Formation Learning Community.

Our  Most Important Question

Already we have learned a great deal. I just returned from our first big trip, having spoken to leaders at four Midwestern seminaries. Here’s a sampling of their responses to our first and perhaps most important question: In your experience, what digital media ministry skills are most important for ministers and ministry students?

• “The literacy of the twenty-first century is the ability to learn, to unlearn, and then learn again … For me, enduring understandings about what changes when media is digital rather than analog are important.”
• “First and foremost, the ability to listen carefully. Secondly, the ability to create, which is intimately bound up with learning.”
• “The question of if we’re going to use new media has been answered. The question of how, and what that means theologically, has been brushed aside … As we embrace this, how we embrace this matters, just like how we talk about the gospel matters and how we do church matters.”
• “An awareness of the different genres of social media and how the form and genre affect human life, faith, and community.”

Exciting Times…to Learn from You

If you resonated with any of those or are just intrigued and want to hear more, we hope you’ll follow our work. One of the more fun ways to do that is to follow the Pinterest board that, for now, is serving as our asset map.

If you’re screaming, “but what about _____?!”, we hope you’ll reach out and arrange an interview. We’ll come to you if we can, otherwise we’ll arrange a web conference call.

Our asset-mapping project will culminate in a digital media for ministry symposium for theological educators, to be held immediately after e-Formation 2016 (June 6-8) in Metro Washington (details still TBD). We hope many of the folks we meet will be able to join us.

These are exciting and challenging times to be a theological educator. If training ministers to thrive in them is part of your mission, it’s part of our mission to learn from you.

Photo Credit: “DSC_8345-Hot Monitoring” by Dieter R – CC by 2.0

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