Ministry in a Box that is Reachable
Jeremy Steele
When people hear that I lead a fully digital spiritual community called Nooma, they usually assume I am doing something wildly experimental. An online-only church. A post-evangelical experiment. Something completely out of the box, untethered from anything recognizable as ministry as they know it.
What surprises most people is how wrong that assumption is.
What I am doing now is not a break from the last 28 years of my life in ministry. It is a direct continuation of it. In many ways, it is the most in-the-box version of ministry I have ever practiced. The box is just digital now.
For nearly three decades, my work has looked essentially the same: teaching from ancient texts. facilitating conversation, walking with people through grief, doubt, joy, and crisis. It’s been helping communities form around shared practices and shared care. What’s changed is not the substance of the ministry. What’s changed is the medium.
Nooma Community exists because the ways people gather have changed, not because the needs of people have.
Every church has a front door. For Nooma, that door happens to be on social media. Daily posts and videos give people a sense of what I believe, how I think, and how this community approaches faith. It is not all that different from visiting a church website, skimming the bulletin, or listening carefully to how a pastor speaks from the pulpit. People are paying attention to tone and posture. They are deciding whether this feels safe, honest, and worth stepping into.
Social media is not the church itself. It is simply where people first encounter it.
When people do step further in, what they find is surprisingly familiar. Our sermons, for example, are livestreamed gatherings on social media where teaching happens in real time. But the medium brings with it the expectation of interaction. So, at the end instead of a benediction followed by coffee hour chatter, the teaching opens into questions. People respond live. They push back. They ask for clarification. They disagree, and ask the questions they’ve always wanted to ask. It feels less like a performance and more like the best version of adult Sunday school: the kind where people were actually allowed to talk.
Our Bible study also follows a recognizable pattern. Instead of gathering in a classroom on a weeknight, the teaching happens through a podcast. Listening replaces sitting in a circle of folding chairs. The conversation continues in a Discord thread rather than around a scratched table with bad coffee. People ask questions, share insights, and wrestle openly with the text and with one another. The location is different, but the communal engagement with scripture is exactly the same.
The same is true of our small groups. They meet on Zoom instead of in living rooms, but the rhythm is familiar to anyone who has ever hosted a group in their home. People show up from different cities, states, countries, and time zones. They share stories, hold space for each other, process life, and build trust over time. The screen does not eliminate intimacy any more than a church basement ever did. It simply removes geography as a barrier.
Pastoral care is completely in-the-box as well. Conversations happen over Zoom and are scheduled online through Calendly. That may sound modern, but functionally it is no different than calling the church office and asking the secretary to put your name on the pastor’s calendar. People reach out when they need support. We meet face to face. I listen as we name what is happening in their lives. The care itself remains deeply personal. Only the scheduling has been streamlined.
Between all of these structured spaces, community life unfolds in the same organic ways it does outside a church among members, just on a platform called Discord. In the text channels there, people talk about scripture and theology. They also talk about television shows they are watching, books they are reading, and the ordinary details of daily life. They ask for prayer before surgeries. They check in afterward. They celebrate milestones and sit quietly with loss. Anyone who has ever lingered in a church hallway after worship or met for coffee with a Sunday school classmate during the week would recognize this immediately.
The only real difference is that none of it requires a shared physical location and only some requires engaging at the same exact time.
Calling this digital ministry sometimes makes it sound like a novelty. In reality, it’s ministry that takes seriously how people actually live now. Many people in Nooma would never walk back into a church building. Some live in places where there is no safe or affirming spiritual community available to them. Others carry religious trauma that makes traditional church spaces inaccessible. The digital space allows them to participate fully without first having to overcome fear, geography, or exclusion.
Nooma is not an attempt to replace church with content. It is an attempt to translate what church has always been at its best into a form people can actually enter.
I did not leave the box. I brought it with me. I just set it down somewhere more people could reach it.