A few weeks ago, I wrote about something that had been bothering me with our church livestream. We kept asking online viewers to engage, and most of them simply didn’t.
We had hosts. We had chat. We had prayer opportunities. We had salvation moments. During our five-minute pre-service countdown, we would ask questions and try to get conversation going. When something happened in the room that called for a response, we tried to create an equivalent response for the person watching online.
Most of the time, it was still crickets.
At first, that felt like an engagement problem we needed to solve. Maybe we needed better questions. Maybe our hosts needed to be more intentional. Maybe we needed to use more of the tools available to us.
But the more we watched the numbers, the more I started wondering whether we were trying to solve the wrong problem.
People weren’t necessarily leaving. Many of them were actually watching for a meaningful amount of time. They just weren’t talking.
That distinction eventually changed the way I think about our entire online-church strategy.
Watching quietly is still watching
One of the biggest things our analytics taught me was that visible engagement and actual attention aren’t the same thing.
We had online viewers watching for 30 or 40 minutes while giving us almost no visible interaction. Chat could be practically empty while the watch-time numbers suggested people were still sitting through a significant portion of the service.
There’s also something else we can’t perfectly measure yet: how people are watching. I believe more of our online audience is watching from a television than we sometimes assume. If someone has YouTube playing on the TV across the room, grabbing a remote and trying to type a chat response is a very different experience from watching on a phone with the keyboard already in your hand.
That doesn’t mean we should never ask people online to respond. We still want to give someone a way to tell us they accepted Christ, ask for prayer, or take a next step. But I’m becoming much less convinced that the amount of activity in a chat box tells me whether online ministry is working.
That realization led to a much bigger question: what are we actually trying to accomplish with our livestream?
Church Online was built around engagement
For us, Church Online had been the dedicated online-church destination outside of Facebook and YouTube. It gave us a service player, chat, hosts, prayer, Moments, and several ways to create interaction around the service.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that model. In fact, if your online ministry is built around a highly engaged digital community, many of those tools could be extremely valuable.
But they weren’t really changing the behavior we were seeing.
We could trigger a Connect Card Moment. We could offer prayer. We could prompt a salvation response. We could have a host asking questions in chat. None of those tools automatically made a quiet viewer become an active participant.
Eventually I started wondering if we were maintaining an entire separate online environment largely because we felt like an “online church” was supposed to have one.
Meanwhile, the thing people seemed perfectly comfortable doing was simply watching the service.
So instead of asking, “How do we get more people to use all these engagement tools?” I started asking, “What is the simplest path from someone watching our church online to actually becoming connected to our church?”
Those are two very different questions.
We decided to move off Church Online
This past week was our last week using Church Online as our dedicated online destination.
That doesn’t mean we stopped livestreaming. It doesn’t mean we suddenly decided online ministry doesn’t matter. And it definitely doesn’t mean I think every church should cancel whatever online-church platform they’re using.
We changed the destination because our goals had changed.
YouTube was already doing the thing we needed most: delivering video reliably on phones, computers, tablets, smart TVs, and just about every other screen someone might use. Instead of building another viewing experience beside YouTube, we decided to let YouTube handle what YouTube is very good at.
But I also didn’t want our answer to simply become, “Go find us on YouTube.”
That’s where our new website strategy became important.
We built our own Online Campus
We created freedomfamily.us/online as the new home for our livestream.
At the top, the page is simple: “Church from anywhere,” our Sunday service times, and the live service. YouTube powers the video, but the viewer is still inside Freedom Church’s website rather than being sent into a completely separate online-church platform.
The important part, though, is everything surrounding the stream.
Right below it, someone watching can connect with us, give, open message notes, or tell us they decided to follow Jesus. Past services are available on the same page, and if someone only wants the message, there’s a clear path to those as well. The live video is still central, but the page isn’t only a video player.
Farther down, the language becomes even more intentional: “Online is a great place to start. Here’s how to go from watching to belonging.” From there we point people toward visiting in person, joining a group, or becoming a member of our church.
That sentence probably describes our current online strategy better than anything else I could write.
Online is a place to start.
The destination matters as much as the distribution
This has also helped me separate two things I used to think about almost interchangeably: distribution and destination.
Facebook can be distribution. YouTube can be distribution. Someone may discover a service because it appeared in their feed, because they subscribed to our channel, or because a friend shared it.
But that doesn’t mean those platforms have to be the entire destination.
Our website can now be the place where all those pieces come back together. The main Freedom Church site presents Sunday as two ways of participating: join us in the room in Gallatin or worship with us through the Online Campus. The online experience is no longer treated as a completely separate ministry floating somewhere beside the rest of the church.
That feels much closer to where I think we’re headed.
Someone may initially find us on YouTube. They may watch from their television for three Sundays and never type a single word into chat. Eventually they might visit the website, look at a previous message, submit a prayer request, check out a group, or decide they want to come in person.
I care a lot more about that journey than whether we can get them to type “Good morning!” during the countdown.
We still need ways for people to respond
None of this means I want to remove response from the online experience.
If our Pastor gives an invitation and someone watching from home decides to follow Jesus, I want it to be incredibly easy for that person to tell us. If someone needs prayer, I want them to have an obvious way to ask. If someone is ready to connect, give, read the message notes, or take another step, those doors need to be available.
The difference is that I no longer think all of those doors need to exist inside a live chat experience.
In fact, putting those next steps on our website may ultimately make them more useful. The viewer doesn’t have to catch a Moment at exactly the right point in the service or understand how a particular streaming platform works. The options are sitting there whenever they’re ready.
That also makes the experience more compatible with the person watching from a television. They can enjoy the service on the biggest screen in the house, then grab their phone when they actually want to do something.
That feels more natural than trying to force every viewer into a second-screen interaction throughout the service.
Maybe we were measuring the wrong thing
This is probably the part of this experiment that interests me most.
For a while, engagement felt like the obvious metric. How many people chatted? How many clicked a Moment? How many prayer conversations started? How many responses did the host get?
Those numbers still tell us something, but I don’t think they tell us everything.
Now I’m much more interested in questions like: Are people actually watching? How long are they staying? Are they coming back? Are they watching messages later? Are they taking next steps? Are people who first encounter our church online eventually showing up in the room?
That last one is especially important to me.
I don’t see our livestream as competition for gathering physically with the church. For some people it may be their only option for a season, and I’m grateful we can serve them that way. For someone else, online may simply be the safest way to visit us for the first time.
They can watch anonymously. They can hear the preaching. They can experience the worship. They can get a feel for the church without walking through an unfamiliar set of doors.
And maybe after doing that for a few weeks, walking through those doors doesn’t feel quite as intimidating.
If that happens, I’m not particularly concerned that they never said anything in chat.
Fewer platforms can create a clearer path
There’s another benefit I didn’t fully appreciate until we started simplifying everything: fewer destinations are easier to communicate.
We recently rebuilt other parts of our digital experience around the same idea. We replaced Linktree with freedomfamily.us/connect, giving us one branded place for many of the links and next steps we regularly communicate on Sunday.
The Online Campus follows the same philosophy.
Instead of telling someone, “Go to this platform for the livestream, this other page for the church website, this app for your next step, and YouTube if you want past content,” we can create a much clearer ecosystem.
Watch at /online.
Connect at /connect.
And both of those live on freedomfamily.us.
There are still third-party services underneath all of it. YouTube is still YouTube. Church Center is still Church Center. Our giving platform is still our giving platform.
The difference is that the person attending our church doesn’t have to understand our technology stack.
They just need to know where to start.
I may change my mind again
I think this is worth saying because Behind Sunday has never been about pretending we have everything figured out.
We just made this change.
We still need to watch what happens. We need to see how people use the /online page, how much viewing happens directly on YouTube, what happens to our Facebook audience, whether people actually use the next-step links, and whether simplifying the experience produces better outcomes.
It’s entirely possible that six months from now I’ll discover something about this strategy that I don’t see today.
But based on what we’ve learned so far, I’m increasingly convinced that the goal of online church shouldn’t be to recreate every aspect of the physical room on a website.
The person at home is having a different experience. Their screen is different. Their environment is different. Their willingness—or even ability—to interact is different.
So maybe our job isn’t to make them behave like the people sitting in the auditorium.
Maybe our job is to make it as easy as possible for them to watch, return, respond when they’re ready, and take one more step toward belonging.
That’s why we moved off Church Online.
Not because online ministry became less important.
Because we finally got clearer about what we want it to do.