You cannot share a meal through a phone. So the online version of the E in BLESS asks a different question: what is one ordinary thing you can do with someone, on purpose, every week, until it becomes yours?
That is the whole practice. A small thing, done together, done again.
The physical version of B.L.E.S.S. says eat. Sit at a table with a neighbour, and somewhere between the main course and the dishes they stop being a neighbour and become a friend. Try to carry that onto a screen and eat is the one practice that will not move. There is no table online. So the digital adaptation swaps the meal for shared experiences, and I think that swap is the most important thing in the whole BLESS framework for anyone doing ministry from a feed.
Why does the meal work in the first place?
It is worth asking, because if you copy the wrong part you build the wrong thing.
The meal does not work because of the food. Nobody came to faith over the quality of a lasagna. It works because two people are doing the same ordinary thing, side by side, with nothing to perform. Nobody is on stage. Nobody is the audience. And it happens again next month, and the month after that, so the conversation does not have to be finished tonight.
Side by side. Again.
Hold onto those two, because almost everything churches build online gets one of them wrong.
Is watching the stream together a shared experience?
I have to confess something here. I have spent a lot of my ministry life building things for people to watch. Streams, shows, clips, episodes… and I have called the comment section “community” more times than I want to count.
But two people watching the same stream in two different living rooms are not sharing an experience. They are sharing a broadcast. They are both audience. The person who leaves a heart emoji in the chat and the person who leaves nothing are, functionally, in the same place: near each other, not with each other.
So what turns watching into sharing? What if you both had to answer the same question afterwards? What if you texted each other during it? What if you met on Thursday to argue about it? Now it is something you did together, and not just something you both saw.
Church, we have gotten very good at producing things for people to consume. We are much less practised at making things people do.
So what can you actually do together?
Start with the other person, not with your ministry. The best shared experiences are things they already like, which means you are joining their world rather than inviting them into yours. That one decision removes most of the awkwardness, because it never feels like a program.
A few shapes this takes:
A turn-based game you both have on your phones, where you make your move every day or two and the chat sits right next to the board. A reading plan, any reading plan, with a two-minute check-in on Sunday night. A walk or a run you both log and compare, even if you live in different time zones. A show you watch on the same night and text about while it is on. A playlist you both add to.
None of these are spiritual, and that is fine. The meal was not spiritual either. It was just the place where spiritual things had room to come up, unhurried, in the middle of something else.
What matters is the rhythm. Pick a small thing and do it every week.
Fifty-two.
That is how many times you will have shown up in a year if you keep a weekly thing going. Fifty-two ordinary evenings with the same person. You would not have that many conversations with your next-door neighbour, and most people have never had that much sustained attention from anyone who follows Jesus.
“But isn’t this just being friends?”
Yes. That is the point.
I hear the objection. Isn’t evangelism supposed to get to Jesus at some point? Isn’t this just hanging out with extra steps? And the answer is that the shared experience is not the place where you make your case. It is the place that makes a case possible. You earn the right to talk about what matters most by being there for the things that matter least.
What usually happens is that the real stuff comes up sideways. In the middle of a game, someone types that their dad is back in hospital. Halfway through a show, someone asks if you actually believe all that church stuff. If you are only ever in their life for the big moments, you will not be there when those sentences get typed. If you are there every Tuesday, you will be.
This is what digital evangelism looks like at the scale of one relationship. Not a campaign. A Tuesday.
The leader’s move
Pastor, here is the uncomfortable question. If someone in your church wanted to invite a friend into something online this week, what would you give them to invite them to?
For most churches the honest answer is the stream. Maybe a clip. Both of those are things to watch. We have equipped people to share content and then wondered why sharing content rarely turns into friendship.
So the leader’s move is to start hosting things people do, alongside the things people watch. A game night on Discord that happens at the same time every week, run by a couple of volunteers who show up whether three people come or thirty. A short weekly reading streak with a check-in thread. An online group that does something before it discusses anything. Small, repeatable, low-stakes. The kind of thing your people would not be embarrassed to send to a friend who has never been to church.
Then give your people permission to build their own. Some of the best shared experiences will never be on your calendar. A member who has been playing the same word game with a co-worker for six months is doing this practice better than your best-produced series. Say so from the front. Tell people that a weekly game with a friend counts as ministry, because otherwise they will assume it does not.
And change what you count. Views tell you who passed by. Returns tell you who is starting to belong. If you host a weekly thing, the number worth watching is how many people came back for the third time, because the third time is where it stops being an event and starts being a rhythm.
This week
Think of one person already in your feed. Not your whole audience… one person. What do they already enjoy? Ask if you can join them in it, and pick a day you will do it again next week.
What would it look like for you to still be doing that same small thing with them next October? Try it, and tell me what you picked.
B.L.E.S.S. is Dave and Jon Ferguson’s framework. The digital adaptation is Dr. John Harris and Jeff Reed’s, in Sharing Jesus Online, with Dave Ferguson’s foreword.
Part of the BLESS series. The full framework is The BLESS Framework.
