We've been running some amazing webinars on Zoom over the last few weeks. Our subjects have ranged from Digital Church to Church Finances to the Everybody Welcome Online. We've had a wealth of speakers both from UK and further afield. It's been fantastic. Numbers have ranged from 500 for the first free one (!!!!) down to less than 100 for the more specific subject areas. Here's a link to the very first one which we put on Facebook:
This week's webinar was on Digital Tools for Digital Church and James Gill from Heart Church in Nottingham spent some time exploring what he's been doing to support his own church's digital provision during the lockdown and giving lots of great tips on team building. James ended his segment by praying for the digital teams and digital pastors who have been working so hard during the lockdown and might now be experiencing a little bit of lockdown fatigue!
Our good friend, Revd Bryony Taylor (@vahva), then shared about all the myriad things that she has been doing during lockdown for her churches in Derbyshire. Bryony has so much talent in creating fantastic digital events but also mapping those across to analogue technologies as well - phone sermons, worship sheets, zoom coffee times. She has a wealth of ideas and has ensure that they are all over on her website. By the end of her presentation, we were referring to her as St Bryony of Clowne!
Bryony has uploaded her talk on Youtube:
Our third speaker was David Adabale from New Wine Church in Woolwich. David shared a wealth of insight into tools which we could use to keep the church going during the lockdown as well as making use of rebrand.ly to measure the impact of our work. David has written a fantastic book on media teams and delivery and shared some of the key ideas around digital team recruitment and engagement.
John Dyer, one my own PhD students, led us in our Bible devotions drawing on his fantastic book on God and Technology, From the Garden to the City. John is Associate Dean at Dallas Seminary and shared some great insights as God who is the Artisan, the Technologist who leads us to create technology for good and showed us the use of technology throughout the Bible and into the coming New Heavens and New Earth. It was fantastic. For more from John, see this article over on BigBible.
Where next?
July 9th, 3:30pm, Digital Inclusivity
Next week we'll be looking at Digital Inclusivity with Tanya Marlow - who suffers from ME and is a regular Premier speaker, Emma Major who champions church for the people with disabilities, along with one of the leaders of the Disability and Jesus project Bill Braviner. Also speaking is Claudia Bell, Head of Learning/Research at ThirtyOneEight who focus on safeguarding and vulnerable adults and also Paul Harcourt, who heads up the New Wine Movement in the Church of England. Our Bible reflections will be Nel Shallow from the Methodist Church. For a preview, read through one of Emma's article in the Church Times:
We've decided to extend this webinar to be a TWO HOUR SPECIAL!
July 15th: Digital Evangelism
Then, on July 15th, we're going to have a Webinar on Digital Evangelism. Our speakers will be Glen Scrivener from SpeakLife.Org, Rachel Jordan-Wolf, Assistant Director at Hope UK, and Kingston Ogango who is Director of Ministry for Alpha Africa. We're going to explore how we do evangelism in a today's digital culture. All three speakers are active in the Digital Church and have been exploring how evangelism might develop in new areas in a post COVID19 church. We're especially going to be exploring the idea of broadcasting seeds which picks up from Glen's Premier Digital Conference Keynote in 2019:
You can access the webinars in three ways:
We'll let you have a FREE ticket for the first time you come along...
Each seminar costs £19.50 - COVID19 has been bad for all of us and we're aware that this is a lot of money. But we need to cover our costs as a charity and we pay all of our speakers. We think it is important to bring you the highest quality.
You can subscribe for only £29.50 a month which is about £7 a week. That means you get a weekly seminar, access to all our recordings in case you miss a seminar, access to the new Youth and Children's Work weekly online magazine (saving £48 per year) and other benefits as we roll them out. In fact, we'll also refund you your ticket price if you have already bought your one seminar ticket. What a great deal for about £7 a week!