This Was Never Just About Digital Ministry
It was always about soul.
In response to the Lilly Endowment Compelling Preaching initiative, the Wesleyan Impact Partners started the Phygital Fellows cohort. Phygital is the combination of the words “physical“ and “digital.” The cohort consists of 19 diverse fellows with differing levels of investment, expertise, and interest in digital ministry. So, while digital ministry became the idea that we gathered around, there was a different idea that brought us together.
But make no mistake. This cohort was about soul. It always has been. And I am guessing it ends that way.
When we gathered in Atlanta for our first time together, I came ready for a different kind of conversation. I had questions. I wanted to chop it up about algorithms, platforms, strategy, and audience growth. I had no one in my life to talk “digital ministry” with.
Instead, we were asked something slower. Something more vulnerable. The beginning was awkward for me. I felt restless. Even in a small inner circle that was supposed to understand the process, I felt frustrated. But what was forming beneath that frustration was not strategy. It was connection. Not connection in the networking sense. Connection on the level of soul. That early awkwardness set the tenor for everything that followed.
Our trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley could have easily been a tour of innovation and disruption. Instead, it became a conversation on ethics. A soul conversation. On the human cost of these platforms. A soul conversation. On what technology is doing to humanity. A soul conversation.
We looked at a soulful startups and asked not just what they build, but what they shape in us. We felt their soulful creativity and the unmistakable weight of the soul-sucking trappings of the industry.
We encountered complexity. Because soulful work in the world is complex. Doing soulful work in technological ecosystems is complex. The skepticism within the fellowship has mattered. It has not been cynicism but discernment. Some fellows stand at the edge of the group’s dominant traditions and keep pulling us back to what matters beneath the structures and language we are comfortable with. Others are building digital expressions of community through podcasts, online gatherings, completely virtual church, and hybrid spaces that move between screens and rooms. Some are experimenting with digital spiritual direction, contemplative practices shared online, and small circles that gather across geography.
Others are curating conversations, storytelling platforms, and learning communities that connect people who might never meet otherwise. Still others are asking deeper questions about technology itself: how it shapes attention, identity, and belonging. Together their work is exploring not only what can happen in digital space, but what the soul of these emerging spaces might be. By focusing on soul, everyone found a voice at the table even in our diversity. It allowed us to learn from one another and the individuals are now collaborating across geography, theological tradition, and tech expertise.
There is no surprise that when each of us explained our projects in on Substack, we returned again and again to the same gravitational center.
Soul.
The Wesleyan tradition is the theological foundation for most of our group. We realize that we do this cohort in the shadow of John Wesley. One of his most prevalent questions was, how is your soul?
There may have been an expectation that this cohort would discern the future of digital ministry. But I am not convinced this was ever about the future. I think it has always been about the present. About how the soul can be tended now. About how we can do soulful work in the present climate. Many of us have been critical of how technology has not been used in the spaces we’ve inhabited. Churches are clinging to structures in decline. Resources poured into maintaining what is dying. Communities are afraid to release what was for the sake of what could be.
We have felt the pain of that.
And yet here, in this cohort, we did not wait for the institutions to catch up. We practiced soul now in unique phygital ways. If John Wesley were alive in the digital age, I suspect he would still ask the same question. And I wonder, if one of our fellows could create an AI algorithm that absorbed all of our writing, all of our work, all of our experiments, would the summary come back as something surprisingly simple?
How’s your soul?