The Narthex: Lessons from the First Year of a Digital Engagement Experiment
by the Rev. Joseph Wolyniak
When Christ Church Denver closed its doors amid the March 2020 pandemic, we found ourselves in unfamiliar territory. Worship services moved online overnight. Community life, once centered in the sanctuary, pivoted onto screens and social media feeds. Episcopalians, I sometimes joke, discovered the Interwebs (even if it was the AOL dial-up version: beep, bop, boop, boooopp, scrsssshh).
What was initially a temporary workaround, though, soon led to a fortuitous insight: digital engagement is the new front door of the church. The vast majority of newcomers will first explore a church online, including 40% of livestream viewers being first-time visitors and 33% of US adults attending an online service at least monthly. Like it or loathe it, digital ministry is here to stay.
Out of that realization was born The Narthex: a Lilly Endowment–funded initiative designed for “median mainline” congregations who find themselves caught between rich sacramental, liturgical, analog traditions and the undeniable need for digital engagement. Christ Church Denver took the lead not as an especially tech-savvy megachurch, but as a congregation with the same size, scale, and struggles as most of us.
The name for this project was intentional. A narthex is the threshold, a transitional space between the world outside and the worshiping body inside. That image captures the heart of the project, where digital ministry isn’t a replacement for embodied faith but a threshold through which seekers, skeptics, and faithful alike can enter into deeper engagement with Christ.
From the start, the project has been collaborative. Six congregations from across the country—Episcopal, Lutheran, and AME—joined as a pilot cohort. Together, we experimented with parish podcasts, new social media strategies, and (unexpectedly) new AI communications tools. Consultants like The Unstuck Group provided an outside perspective, while Caffeinated Church offered peer mentoring and content sharing.
But the why goes deeper than technology. The project exists because the ground has shifted under all of us (and with the advent of the AI era, that ‘shift’ might feel more like a seism). Sunday morning isn’t the default gathering time it once was. For many, the first encounter with a parish isn’t through the red doors but a YouTube search, Facebook clip, or podcast. Digital content is thus a key component in our fulfillment of the Great Commission: to “go and make disciples” (Matthew 28.19–20)
The Narthex then asks: How can liturgical churches honor ancient practices while engaging people who live and move in a digital world?
After the first year of this five-year project, three lessons have surfaced.
First, digital outreach is newcomer engagement. While in-person gathered community remains our rightful priority, digital engagement is a chief means to that end. So too, digital outreach can help our own membership live out their baptismal “vocation and ministry” as the church scattered––in their everyday, Monday through Saturday lives. Digital can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t replace embodied worship, fellowship, or service (we should not see digital as an excuse to “neglect meeting together, as is the habit of some,” Hebrews 10.24–25), but we arguably should treat it as a lasting ministry priority… not just a pandemic workaround.
Second, strategy, scope, and staffing matter. Our pilot congregations learned the importance of clarifying audiences, tailoring communications to different points on the spiritual journey, and aligning engagement goals accordingly. Reaching those goals often required rethinking staffing—whether through new roles, redirected funds, or part-time remote help. While not always seamless, clear coordination, defined roles, and thoughtful integration have proven essential.
Third, it’s OK to try and not succeed. Perhaps our biggest learnings have come where ambitious vision runs up against institutional constraints: limited budgets, scant staff, overtaxed volunteers, and the reality that we don’t always have tech-savvy digital natives in the pews with bandwidth (no pun intended) for new projects. And yet, even in those moments, there has been grace: permission to start small, experiment, learn from dead ends, and keep going with a little more wisdom the next time around.
So what might this mean for your congregation? A few practical pointers:
Start with assessment. Don’t buy cameras or overhaul your website until you’ve honestly mapped where your people are and what you’re trying to accomplish. Sometimes an outside consultant can give you the clarity you need, seeing the forest for the trees.
Integrate, don’t replace. Let your digital presence extend and support your sacramental life rather than compete with it. Our identity is rooted in Word and Table; your online presence should serve that, not dilute it.
Find peers. Whether through a formal cohort (like Caffeinated Church’s peer mentoring groups) or more informal gatherings of likeminded colleagues, don’t go it alone. Share failures and successes, swap resources, “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thessolonians 5.11). We’re in this together.
The Narthex isn’t a blueprint so much as a living lab. Our first year has shown that rooted, analog churches can flourish in digital spaces without compromising their deepest commitments. More than anything, this work reminds us that God meets us at the threshold—whether in the narthex or online—always inviting us into deeper communion within the Body of Christ.
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Joseph Wolyniak is a Project Director of The Narthex: Developing Digital Capacity for the Analog Church, a ministry of Christ Church Denver in association with Caffeinated Church. A remote member of the Christ Church Denver pastoral staff, he lives in Seattle, WA, where he also serves as vicar of St David Emmanuel in Shoreline, WA, and teaches theology at Seattle University. He is available to consult with pastors, communicators, or lay leaders
Interested in a $12,000 digital capacity subgrant to invigorate or expand digital engagement in your church? Check out the Narthex subgrant application here (due October 15, 2026) with further information, application instructions, grant-use ideas, sample plan, budget, timeline, etc., found here.
