What Is phygital?
The term phygital was coined before I joined the Learning and Innovation Team at Wesleyan Impact Partners. So when I am asked What is phygital?, I usually give two responses. The first is obvious: the combination of physical and digital. And the second is honest: I wasn’t in the room when we landed on it. After several years of Phygital Fellows gatherings and Substack posts later, to be honest I’m still not sure if I like the term. But I decided to spend less time on whether I like the word and more on what it is trying to describe.
Phygital is the space where the physical and the digital meet, overlap, and shape each other. It’s the reality that most people already inhabit, and all people are impacted. You’re at dinner with your family, and someone is simultaneously in a group chat. You walk into a sanctuary, and someone miles away is watching the same service from their living room. You’re at a high school football game in a small town on a Friday night with the whole community in the stands, and someone is using their data plan to livestream it for the grandparent who can’t make the drive.
Physical and digital are inextricably linked, and the phygital discussions I’ve been a part of over the last two-plus years have helped me understand the reality affecting all of us. We don’t stop being embodied when we go online. We don’t stop being digital people when we walk through a door. This is not a season the church can wait out. The phygital world is not a trend, it is the terrain. And faith leaders must engage it thoughtfully, because evolution continues with or without us.
The Phygital Fellows Initiative has been one of the most meaningful laboratories for exploring that question. Our 19 Fellows have gathered in Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago to sit together in the phygital conversation and consider what this reality means for preaching and Gospel proclamation across various ministry contexts. The posts in this Substack are the corpus of those conversations, experiments, learnings, and takeaways. The work we’ve done through this initiative have confirmed for me that phygital is not a niche conversation. It is the conversation of our time.
Why It Matters
This has all led to a bold, personal conviction: I have come to believe that any person in ministry in the 21st century must thoughtfully, theologically, and consistently wrestle with the ways that technology is shaping human lives. I’m not saying we must adopt it, and I am not suggesting we only critique it either.
We must, like Jacob, wrestle with it. Like Moses and Deborah, we must figure out how to preach ancient liberation into a world that speaks an entirely new language in a context nobody has mapped before. Like Nehemiah and Shiphrah and Puah, we must be willing to survey what is broken and, where the system demands death, quietly and strategically build life anyway. Like Esther, we must find a way to hold our convictions AND our people as we navigate oppressive systems for such a time as this.
These biblical metaphors point to the kind of values and actions that are necessary in a phygital world. I do not see a single space or place on the planet where a minister of the gospel can say, “This doesn’t affect me or my people, so I don’t need to think about it.” This isn’t a call for pastors and preachers to become tech enthusiasts. Nor is it a suggestion that faith leaders and wisdom teachers be tech-agnostic or tech-avoidant. It is a call to engagement, curiosity, and integrity.
In today’s society, people across the socio-economic, geographic, and ideological spectrums are being shaped by the invisible hand of the algorithm and the unseen influence of new technologies. From their attention to their purchases, their sense of self to their sense of belonging, the definitions of beauty to their understandings of meaning: all of it is being negotiated in digital spaces and by a digital economy.
Devices matter. Platforms matter. Artificial Intelligence matters. Influencers matter. Data centers matter. Digital footprints matter. Natural resources matter.
And our message matters. The Gospel matters. The wisdom of our ancestors and the traditions that will guide us to the future matter. People matter.
If we are not talking about this in our pulpits, our small groups, our pastoral conversations, and our formation programs, we are not actually meeting people where they are. Whether we are adopting or rejecting a new technology, it must be done with intention. This is faithful ministry in the 21st century, and that is why phygital matters.
What We’re Doing Next
So where do we go from here?
At the end of this month, we’re gathering approximately 75 preachers, spiritual innovators, and institutional leaders in Berkeley, California to expand and deepen this conversation beyond the 19 Phygital Fellows. During our time together, we will explore four conversations that have emerged from the work of the Fellows. We’ll share more about them here on Substack over the next two weeks, but what I’ll say now is this: they go deep. These are not conversations about which apps to download or how to grow your social media following. We’ll be talking about what we create, what it means to be fully present and fluent in digital space as leaders, what we are responsible for building, and how we hold our people when the world we’re navigating doesn’t share our values.
The room in Berkeley is just one or two circles wider from the 19 Phygital Fellows, and we wished we could have made it wider still. This conversation deserves more voices than any single gathering can hold, which is why this Substack will continue to be a regular space for these reflections, provocations, and questions to spill out. Wherever people are trying to make meaning, the church has a reason to be present. That has always been true. The phygital world is our parish.
This is the work.