Online Views are Skyrocketing!
The Unstuck Group is one of the best church consulting organizations in The USA and Canada. They’ve released their quarterly report, which every church leader in the USA should follow.
One of the things they track each quarter is live-stream views of 1-minute or more. After the pandemic, predictably, this number went down across most churches. At the time, we cautioned churches to not read too much into this, and expect upticks in the future.
So what did they find this year?
Live-stream views have gone up 32% year over year. That’s the biggest growth since the pandemic.
What does that mean?. That is an indicator that online views dropped temporarily after the pandemic…but the broader shift to both/and for churches continues.
This seems to represent growth both in congregation members engaging both online and in-person, and growth in live-streams as “the new front door” of churches. That is, parishioners in healthy churches, people who often attend in-person on Sunday mornings, are engaging more with the online worship. Also, people investigating growing churches are watching the live stream before engaging in-person.
The live-stream is not the most important thing a church does. However, it is indicative of other priorities. The live-stream plays a central role in supporting community outreach and internal discipleship. The days where we could ignore tech are gone (if we want our church to thrive).
We would love to chat about how your church’s live-stream can help you connect with your local neighborhood! Schedule a conversation with us, and let’s talk about how to solve your church’s needs.
Oh…and just in case you think The Unstuck Report has nothing to do with “churches like yours…”
What kind of churches are included in this report?
That’s the great thing about this report: it surveys a broad swath of American and Canadian churches. Almost 400 churches report to The Unstuck Group. These churches vary from under 100 attendees on a Sunday morning to the biggest megachurches. They also vary from mainline traditional denominations (over half of reportees) to evangelical nondenominational churches.
The biggest issue to remember with this report is it’s self-selected for churches that are trying to become more healthy. That means churches who do not ask about their own effectiveness are under-represented here. Truthfully, that’s most American churches. But that’s a blessing in disguise: the result is that The UnStuck Report shows us what is happening in effective churches. It shows us what happens in churches that are more community-focused than Inward-Focused. It shows us what happens in churches that believe they have something to offer their community.
