Digital Parish: TikTok for churches

Ryan Dunn:

This is Pastoring in the Digital Parish, your resource and point of connection for building digital ministry strategy and bringing your congregation into the digital age. Hi. My name is Ryan Dunn. Let's talk more TikTok. I had noticed a trend on the platform that it was very hard for branded institutions or organizations to get exposure. I'd started to draw a conclusion, and it was that TikTok was a bit like Facebook in that it highlights or promotes person-to-person interaction, so personal accounts get more exposure than branded accounts. I'd noticed this in my own experience. The commercial account I manage gets hundreds of thousands of views when we pay for exposure, but normal, un-boosted posts generally just get a few hundred views with the occasional viral hit that sees more.

Meanwhile, my very underutilized, seldomly-posted-to personal account generally gets as many views as the organic posts on the much more followed branded account. So the conclusion that I drew was that ministries would get more exposure on TikTok through a leader's account than they would through a branded institutional account. Then, I came across First United Methodist Church of Birmingham, Alabama. They've had several posts organically reach tens of thousands of people. A couple have organically reached hundreds of thousands of people, and that is not bad exposure for a self-proclaimed, mid-sized congregation. There's something to learn here, so I reached out to the church staff and got in touch with Katherine Mullen, who is First Church's Minister of Community Engagement and also one of their worship leaders.

Katherine is the point person for First Church's TikTok presence. Now, I wanted to know about First Church's TikTok strategy and what have been the results of their wide end exposure through TikTok. I thought maybe I would just use some clips from my talk with Katherine, but everything she shared was so relevant and impactful that I got her permission to just roll out the whole conversation, which is what we're doing in this session of Pastoring in the Digital Parish. So let's get talking TikTok strategy, going viral, and managing church vision with Katherine Mullen of First United Methodist Church of Birmingham. Katherine, thanks so much for giving the time. First of all, tell me about being a minister of community- That's just so you feel comfortable, you understand?

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. So community, you want to start over?

Ryan Dunn:

I do, yeah.

Katherine Mullen:

Cool.

Ryan Dunn:

Thank you. Let's do it. Katherine, thanks so much for giving us your time this afternoon. Tell me a little bit about being a minister of community engagement. What does that role look like?

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah, so as far as engaging the community in several ways, I wear lots of different hats, I was mentioning to you earlier. So social media and social media engagement is one, and our church-wide fun events for community building and just play, things that are important to us in our engagement, in our community. Our small group ministries, which is all about engaging everybody with one another and finding common connection and our church-wide retreat, which is our peak culminating, community building event for our church every year. So all of that, I have ownership of in addition to leading worship, my community engagement aspects of my job are all of those things that I listed.

Ryan Dunn:

You just had your churchwide retreat last weekend. Is that right?

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. We just got back from that, yeah.

Ryan Dunn:

What do you do with that?

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. It was an amazing time. We were up in Jasper, Alabama at Camp McDowell Episcopalian Campus. They're lovely people, and their facilities are beautiful. Our theme for the weekend, our title of the event or of the retreat was Cultivate: Searching for Wisdom, Connection, and Peace, and we thought that it was appropriate, timely, and important for our congregation to be having conversations about wisdom, connection, and peace with everything that's going on in the United Methodist Church, but also for within our church and feeling good about, we did some values work.

And so we encouraged our staff a year ago, did some values work as a team, and we narrowed down, out of 50 values, our 2 top values for each of us individually to help us each understand one another's motivations and the way in which our priorities for one another, and then as a team what our priorities are. And so it was fascinating to do the values work with our entire congregation, or about 150 people, and we did a word map or a word kind of cloud of everybody's values that they inputted. Authenticity was the top, kindness was top. I think justice was up there as well, so things that we've known forever, which is so nice to be able to reorient back to what our values are as a congregation. Then, also, the values work was within a larger theme, which was we took off of the book by Angeles Arrien, The Four-Fold Way, so learning about the way of the warrior, the way of the healer, the way of the visionary, and the way of the teacher.

And so being able to communicate what all of those things are, have our congregation relate to each one of them, how we might run into obstacles, navigating each of those ways, and then how we might achieve those ways as we navigate through the world. So fascinating stuff and great stuff that I think our folks ate right up. It was very formative for a lot of people. And so on top of all of the amazing content, we did lots of fun things too, and so we had some community engagement-based activities, like s'mores, karaoke, and games, and so it was a really, really wonderful weekend.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. Well, and you have to call it a win when it's like the congregation reflects back the values that you assume that the church has, because sometimes there's a disconnect there between the leadership of the church and the actual practice of the congregation.

Katherine Mullen:

And the way we gathered all of those was so that, in the end, our staff has access to what our congregation's values are. Though those are the big illuminating ones, those top five values, we still have record of all the other values that are important to different people, which I think is important for us to know as we navigate our leadership in the church. It just helped us get to know our congregation in just a deeper way.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. Well, how much of your job within the confines of the community engagement is digital or done through social media?

Katherine Mullen:

More than you think.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah? Okay.

Katherine Mullen:

And more than I anticipated, which is fine, because it might be a generational thing. It might be an interest thing, or it might be both, that technology comes easier to me than maybe the rest of our staff. Maybe not for everybody, and there's always new things popping up in ways to engage, and Facebook is one of those, where I feel like every year they're adding more abilities to create ads and to engage, not only your own congregation internally, but be able to engage the community outside of your church. Avenues like TikTok, that are public to whoever is accessing that medium, and so that is all digital. Then, I work with a lot of spreadsheets with registrations, numbers, and forms for our groups and forms for our events. And so I would say every now and then I have to print out something so that I can scribble on for my own sanity, but the majority of my job is done digitally, for sure.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. And within that, are you running all the social media accounts for the church?

Katherine Mullen:

I am, yes.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah, okay.

Katherine Mullen:

So we have a presence on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. And I would argue that each three of those are different people in our church accessing those majority. I'd say we have a different demographic on each of those platforms, and I would say that our "buzz" on those platforms varies with each one and our activity on them, and I think our content varies a little bit as well, which is kind of what I've seen in the pattern of our engagement on social media.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah, okay.

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah.

Ryan Dunn:

Let's talk TikTok a little bit because, as you look across the number of views of First UMC Birmingham on their TikTok channel, it seems like the bottom line is a few thousand. The top line pushes up to, I don't know, several posts have gotten over 80,000 views. I don't think your congregation is that big, so you're-

Katherine Mullen:

No.

Ryan Dunn:

So you're hitting quite a different audience there, but let's back up from that before we get into maybe who you're connecting with there. Why did First Church Birmingham first get on to TikTok?

Katherine Mullen:

So I took over the community engagement job, or it was created, and I took on the role in July of 2021, and by August, late August, September, we had our first video go viral. A lot of it was my urging of the staff that we needed to have a presence on TikTok, because my hope was that we could accomplish engaging people in Birmingham, people in Alabama. I had not even gotten as far as outside of Alabama, but just to let them know that we're here, even though I've lived here for almost six years and did not know and was not aware of First Church's mission and their presence in Birmingham until I saw the job posting for my first job that I started in 2019. And so I thought that was fascinating that, as a young person with values that align with this institution, how I had no awareness that they were here.

TikTok, as a social media platform, accomplishes that of awareness that places are present and that people are present, and is a way to connect people with the algorithm that happens in every social media platform. What it does and its intention is to bring you things that would interest you and that would align with you. I think TikTok does that 24/7. You're constantly finding things that appeal to you based on the content that you watch and the media that you consume, and so I felt like our media and our mission needed to be on a platform that people could consume, that have similar values and just know that we're here. So that was my first dream, I guess, for TikTok, that it could allow people in Alabama and Birmingham to know there's a church like us, and to come and check us out, and get to know us, and going viral did just that.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. Okay.

Katherine Mullen:

That was a very unexpected to get that much attention. I think it still might be our most viewed video, and we have gotten several visitors in the last couple of years because of that video.

Ryan Dunn:

Was it one of your first ones, one of your first videos?

Katherine Mullen:

It was our very first one.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah? Okay.

Katherine Mullen:

It was following a trend, and that was what I had seen when I gotten the job. I think I had been talking about us getting on TikTok maybe around the time I got hired for the job, and so I kind of got some ideas together, and that was the first idea that we used with the majority of our full-time staff. It was the trend of, "Nope," and "Yup," and following a trend that just was being accentuated at the time.

And I thought, "Hey, why don't we try this, and let's be creative in who we are as a church, and let's see if people notice that we're here." There's that one person in Birmingham that is looking for a church and is frustrated, and they're searching because we are a city of churches, and we all vary, and we are not the only progressive church here, but what if we had a platform in which we could reach those people easier? And it did.

Ryan Dunn:

And it's telling. You said it, "What if there was one person there?" So it's not like you were getting on the platform being like, "Man, I can't wait until we hit 100,000 views."

Katherine Mullen:

Oh. No, no, no.

Ryan Dunn:

No?

Katherine Mullen:

I truly thought, and because I had seen other churches pop up, individual pastors like you were talking about earlier, that were a representation of a church community in different areas, like Grand Prairie, UMC. I forget where they're located. Maybe Missouri? They're located somewhere, and they already had a presence. Then, there were a couple of pastors who put in their bio that they were the pastor of a community, but they were not speaking for that community itself, or they were kind of going back and forth. They were more of a personality, and I thought it would be interesting to platform the church as just one personality and have it also be fun. I mean, it was trendy, and our young people at our church and some of our older people too are on TikTok, and they love it and they think it's fun.

And I thought that that would just be a fun way to even just engage our own community, and do trends that are sweet and authentic to who we are, that we could at least entertain our internal community, because they're funny and they're fun. Play and fun is a big priority of our senior pastor, Stephanie Arnold. She's constantly reminding us that a priority of ours is to have fun, to play, and to exercise that because there's holiness in that. And so that was really the intention, was just to be like, "Maybe we'll catch a couple of people or a friend of a friend who goes to our church. They'll see us." The night that we posted it, I think I had posted it at 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM, and I was in my apartment at 10:00 PM refreshing our notification. I mean, we were getting so much traction, and it was very overwhelming, and it was crazy. Yeah.

Ryan Dunn:

Did you have a strategy when you were building the channel? Were you like, "Okay. We're hit this topic, this topic," or?

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah.

Ryan Dunn:

Or what?

Katherine Mullen:

Sort of. So when we got on there, I had a few ideas that I had listed, and our first video was an idea, and I thought, "Let's intersect some fun and who we are as a church," and we know that, just as a nation in America, in the United States as a church in the south, in the Bible Belt, we are a bit of an anomaly. Part of hopping on all these trends and making them cater to us, our values, and who we are is not only creative, but again, back to the algorithm, it's going to align with people who have the same values. And so the strategy was just connection or just almost like, "Here we are. This is who we are," and it did not go past that until, I think, the other strategy we had was, "All right. Let's use some hashtags."

And we had a ton of hashtags on that first video to cater to those people that have similar values that we do. I think one hashtag was "progressive clergy." One was "UMC," and then, "Birmingham, Alabama." I mean, using hashtags that will cater to the algorithm, and hashtags are on almost every social media platform, so it was not necessarily a TikTok strategy at all. I think the strategic part of it being a TikTok was the sound that was going viral and the trend that we were hopping on, but that was the only strategy that went into it. And I think after we went viral the first time, we figured out what worked, and we did a couple other videos after that that got attention. I think, just because we had gotten so much from the first one, we were more visible after that.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. Kind of a residual.

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. It's definitely been a learning by video of like, "What's the timing that most people are on and seeing this?" And what's amazing about TikTok is that the insights feature, after you post a video, you give it 24 hours, and the insights will tell you the age of the people that are watching your videos. There's a chart on there for men and women, as who identifies as which and who's watching your videos, and what areas of the world. I mean, it's fascinating, and so we have majority female-identifying persons watching our videos, and our age group is 25 to 40, is our majority demographic that watches those videos. And so that's helpful for us to know, as far as the content we're putting out there, because we know who is seeing it, the majority of people who are seeing it.

Ryan Dunn:

So have you developed a strategy now, not just in terms of content, but even you mentioned posting time. Do you have a spread of topics and a whole content calendar planned out, or how does that look these days?

Katherine Mullen:

We haven't had our meeting yet for it, but I like to plan out six or seven months ahead of our social media calendar. I have a Google document where I'm posting, "On this day, we have this coming up," so four days before it we're posting on Instagram and TikTok, or we're posting on Instagram and Facebook. And we have developed, kind of just recently, a routine where maybe once a month, we pick a day for 30 minutes, and there's a bunch of trends that I found that we film four or five TikToks that day, and then once a week we're posting. So the capacity right now is about once a week when we have a planned idea, but for example, when we went viral, I think the video that you caught, we went viral, I guess three weeks ago.

We did a couple videos after that. One was Stephanie just talking to our new followers, because there was an awareness that we had gone very viral again, and people had a lot of questions, and not just questions that were more tongue-in-cheek and maybe a little critical, but people who genuinely were wondering, "Okay. This place feels right for me, but is it too good to be true? What are your values of this, and where do you stand on this?" And so we felt like doing an introductory introductory video again, would be helpful for those new people. Then, we also have TikToks up from our internal events, and so we've done an arts camp video, and we do Wednesday night programming, so we have a video up for that.

And so for me, TikTok not only is useful in the sense that it creates and curates videos so easily that we can use on other social media platforms or send in an email about an event, so it uses for our own congregation for that purpose, but for people on the outside looking in, those trends, hopping on those popular sounds, or things like that, that has shown there's a reward there as far as engagement and visibility. What I found, our strategy, you could say, is those pre-planned videos, because we're really just a six full-time staff team, so we do a lot of things. So we're very busy, so we're not just sitting around building TikToks all the time.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. I noticed that on the job descriptions on the website, a lot of people are A and B. Minister of A and B.

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. Exactly. And so I have found Thursdays feel like a good day for us and our engagement, 5:00, 6:00 PM feels like it. If I'm going to put out a video that is more of a, "Okay. This has intention to be posted for a TikTok audience, so this is a trend that we're hopping on that we think is creative," I'm going to be posting that on Thursdays around 5:00, 6:00 PM. This just feels like our time, when that video goes up. It's the time people are getting off work. It's the time people are scrolling before they make dinner, and they're catching it. It catches that first round of attention, and then after that, it gets put in the algorithm as a viral video. Not all of them function the same way, right? Some will be viral, and then some will get some medium attention, moderate attention, and then some will just get a handful of views.

I don't think that, at least because we're so early in this presence that we have, we're still in the process of learning what works. And at the end of the day, if one doesn't get any attention, it's not a failed product in any sort of way. We're just creating a presence. What I have found, when you're on TikTok or when you're on a social media platform, and the algorithm presents to you content or media to consume that aligns with what you like, you're going to go to the account to see where the source is. What my intention is with creating our account is to create enough videos to where we have content that reflects who we are as a church, who we are as a community, what our values are, where we're located, so that people can get a really good picture of who we are as a church.

And that's the goal, is that when we're connecting with people in the area, it's not just the one funny tongue-in-cheek video we put up. It's that they can go to the source and figure out exactly who we are, so our website is in our bio. Anytime we have questions that we can answer easily in comments, we say, "Hey, go to our website." A lot of times people want to know, "Where can I find this kind of church near me?" And we have a resource for reconciling ministries in our bio that people can click and see where they're located, so we try to do some of that engagement as well, people engaging with communities in their area that align with the values that they have seen in our videos.

Ryan Dunn:

That goes back to that idea of posting for one person, in that not every video you're posting is deliberately for a viral presence, right? You're just trying to paint an entire picture, and some of that may be like the dull background colors, so to speak.

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. I would argue that all of our videos, we will just post and see who catches it, because our priorities are to just make sure people know who we are. If that's the one college student that just moved here and needs to find a community like ours, or that is several people in Birmingham or outside. We have people who drive from Huntsville. We've had people come up from Tuscaloosa, smaller Alabama towns that don't have a church similar to us near them, to just come and experience it. And a lot of times people will come, they experience it for a few weeks, and then they almost get their fix in the sense of, "This exists, and this community exists, and I bet I can find this somewhere near me," or we have people that come and have become members in the last year, and it all started with TikTok, which is mind blowing.

Ryan Dunn:

That is, yeah.

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. That's so hopeful. Hey, the other hopeful thing I find about your account is that, when I was first being exposed to TikTok, from a creator standpoint, there's all this pressure to just get as much content out there. They tell you, "Oh. You need to be posting several times a day or at least every day." It looks like you'll sometimes go like a week or maybe even more between posts, and it doesn't seem to hurt you in the algorithm. Are you finding that's true?

Katherine Mullen:

I would agree, absolutely. I would find that we've just kind of come now to a strategy of the frequency in which we post, and we've been able to see in the viral video, we've gone viral probably three times since we've had an account, which has been almost three years. No-

Ryan Dunn:

What's your definition of viral? Because as I look, I saw the numbers. They're pretty big by most standards.

Katherine Mullen:

Sure, sure. So I would say viral in the quickness in which a video picks up, and then the span in which the views are. And so I can even tell you the three videos I think of. It's our very first one, and then the ones following that went a little viral as well. But that was our first, I think maybe almost still our biggest one. I'm a numbers' girl, so I can remember when and where. So August-ish, 2021 was that video. And then 2022 in May, we had a very quick video that picked up, and it was us saying how easy it is for us to be accepting of all peoples, and that got some video attention and some views.

Then, our last video about two, three weeks ago that went viral. Those are, I think, to me, if you were to look at it like a measurement scale or linearly, those are our biggest peaks in attention and views. They're all about what we value as a church and who we are, and that's our intention. We don't want to pretend to be a church that we're not, and we don't want to hop on a trend that maybe doesn't completely align with who we are. There will be ideas that I'll spout off or videos that other staff see on their TikTok, and we'll talk about it and we'll workshop it as a team. We realize this is not for us, and not only will our congregation maybe not understand, but people on the outside. Is it giving the most authentic representation of who we are as a church? And if the answer is not a 100% yes, then we won't do the video.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. Okay.

Katherine Mullen:

I would say that that's an intention of ours. Number one intention is authenticity. So not only is it a value of our congregations, but it's also a value of our team and how we present to the world via social media, and are we hopping on trends that feel authentic? Would we be able to sit with someone and really hash out the value that is expressed in that video? If it doesn't feel like it's completely aligned with who we are, then we won't do it.

Ryan Dunn:

Okay. What's your moderation or response strategy? So certainly, I'm sure that some of the messages that you're sharing are not always well received by everybody in the Christian community. I mean, do you have a strategy for response to that kind of stuff or deleting that stuff?

Katherine Mullen:

So this is what we've hopped from what we've seen, so we don't have necessarily policies or a covenant with it, but I would say our general rules in that responsing and that engagement. Because we're not a personality on TikTok, we are representing an institution, a First Church. If there's comments that would be perceived as harassment or bullying of our staff that are presented, or whoever's in the video, if it is language that is not kind from whoever is speaking, it gets deleted. That's based on what I see, and that's up to my call, I guess, on that. We had one comment. We had gone viral, and then someone had gone on one of our older videos and commented. It felt threat-like or threat-adjacent.

As soon as I saw it, I deleted it, and I ended up making sure that that user could no longer see our content. It's tricky, because we may have a larger presence at a time on social media, but at the end of the day, we are a moderately sized Methodist church in Birmingham, Alabama. And so the safety of our staff is also really important, and the safety of our people is also really important. We do not have situations like threats often, but even if it's language about people in the video that's not kind, I'm deleting it. There may be other unkind things that are said about who we are as a church, but that is not anything that we are new to, as far as just who we are, and our existence just frustrates a lot of people in the conference anyway, and people outside of Methodist Church.

I mean, a lot of times we get comments from people that sometimes they're not religious at all, and the idea of just an institution that exists with "worldly values" does not make sense in their brain; therefore, it has no reason for existing. So we have that one side that is not fond of us, and then we have the complete other side where it's more conservative, more fundamental religious individuals that do not think that we are of the Bible. They do not think that Jesus exists here, that the Holy Spirit exists here, and all of that is their opinion based on their perception. So we let that sit, and we let that be conversation starters, or we let other people respond how they want to in those comments. And so I just try to watch, which is tricky, but I try to be on the app when we go viral as often as I can to monitor. You said something about our response strategy?

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah, Mm-hmm.

Katherine Mullen:

So if you go to one of our videos, you'll see that we're intentional about what we choose to respond to. It's easy questions. "Where are you located? Are LGBTQI persons here accepted and affirmed?" Things that we can clearly answer on, especially in a brief amount of time in text, which is always tricky when you have delicate conversations or nuanced conversations. We tend to stick to responding to the easy things and things that we can be very clear about. There are other conversations that are more nuanced for us and would be more nuanced for any church, and so we will direct people to our website or we will invite them to come check us out and worship.

There will be some questions that, as an individual, I would love to respond to, but I also understand that, as the person in who is navigating that app and navigating our presence on that app, I'm speaking for our institution, and I'm speaking for our staff and for our people that are members here. And so there will be questions that I can't confidently answer, and so we'll leave it, or we direct them to our website, which we have our values, and we have our mission statement, who we partner with on our website, and who is on our staff. We get that question a lot. What sort of representation we have on our staff, and we'll direct people to our website, so they can see for themselves. We find that releases some of the management of conversations that we just really can't control. So I would say that that's probably the strategy at this point.

Ryan Dunn:

Okay, and in reaction to the viral stuff, have you noticed a thread through the videos that have gone viral?

Katherine Mullen:

We've had some threads. I'm going to pull it up now, because I was looking earlier actually. We've had some that are big critiques, and a lot of times it's the comments that come first in videos. When we go viral, we'll get some comments to start, and someone will say one thing, and it has a larger thread that pops up, because people are wanting to engage with that conversation and with that question. I want to say that the trending conversation on the last video was, I'm going to pull it up. A lot of people, this is in Alabama, like what? And all these people are liking it and engaging with it, because they're thinking the same thing. Then, several comments are, who are not as affirming of our image or our values, are asking questions or saying, "I don't understand how this exists."

And people underneath are saying, "Yeah, absolutely."

And then there's people under that saying, "Well, no. You're wrong, and here's why."

So it is fascinating to see what comments and what threads will get the most engagement. One is someone saying that we're not a biblical church, and so people have engaged a lot with that. There's almost 80 replies under that comment saying both things, "No, they are, and here's why."

"No, they're not, and here's why."

So someone asked if we were the Babylon Bee, like a tongue-in-cheek comment. I mean, we find that engagement happens. There's a lot of engagement with those comments that they're not supportive of who we are. Then, after a few more days, there will be a larger per presence presence of people who are in line with our values in the video, and they'll comment and they're liking all the comments that are like, "What a great place," and "I'd love to be here," so it varies. You'll hear a phrase when you're on TikTok with certain creators, where they end up on the wrong side of TikTok. I think that when we have a viral video, we end up on all sides of TikTok. Sometimes even saying that that's the wrong side is really tricky, because I think that we are a church that is challenging for a lot of people. I wouldn't even say that that idea within itself is a wrong idea, so it varies. There's no pattern there yet necessarily.

Ryan Dunn:

Okay. All right. Well, this has been really helpful. You really helped kind of clarify some strategy for thinking about a church-driven presence on TikTok. Not just in that space, but I don't know, the message that I keep going back to is how easy are we being known to the community?

Katherine Mullen:

For sure.

Ryan Dunn:

And it seems like your strategy really centers on that.

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. In one of your questions, you had had asked me in our email thread last week, was our response that our congregation has, and I wanted to talk about that because that is something that we found to be, not necessarily unexpected, but while we might have these viral videos, and lots of random strangers commenting on who we are and how wonderful it is that they're here, and they're laughing at the trends we do because it's funny and it's creative, and while some people in our congregation are on TikTok and they understand that, there is also a large amount of our congregation that does not understand TikTok. That's what I said earlier, we'll have TikToks that are catered to our people. "Here's what we're doing this Wednesday night. Come to our Fat Tuesday pancake dinner next week, because here's what's going to be there."

All of that's going to be on there, and that's going to be catered to our people, but when there's videos on certain trends, we don't expect our church members to be, "Yeah," and super, our cheerleaders for that. When we first got on TikTok and became viral, we had some hard conversations with some of our members in our congregation. Not that they were not supportive, they just did not understand. And so what I do hope other churches can hear is that taking some time to workshop your intentions with your presence on social media, and that we know that we have these intentions for these videos, and we know that these videos that will go viral and that are hopping on a trend on TikTok don't exist in the day-to-day life of our people. It's humbling, it's grounding, and re-centering to remember that our image that we display on social media is a part of who we are.

But our people in our church here are just as important. They're not engaged in the TikTok as much as it is the people who are not in town, and the people who are not at First Church. I would not say that they are unsupportive and that they are disappointed in our presence at all. I just think they're unengaged and they're disenchanted, and you will have that. That is not a sign to not be present. It is just a reality for a lot of our people in our church, and we also have to be understanding of that. Some have found it originally a little embarrassing, because we're very visible when that happens. This place exists. As a church, it exists as a holy, sacred place. There might be people that perceive social media presence and all the things that can come with social media that are not holy and sacred. It is very hard to decipher that.

And so I think staffs that are ready to walk into that conversation, or I would encourage staffs to be ready to walk into that conversation with their people, because we've had to do some guiding and we've had to do some navigating when our early presence went viral. Now it's a part of the culture, right? And so sometimes we'll have TikToks. Even when we went viral three weeks ago, in one of our services, we projected some comments that we got, just to show people who are not on TikTok and don't have interest in being on there, "Hey, here's going on here, and here's kind of how we're visible in this way, and here's what people are saying." Some of the comments were the funny ones. What is awesome about some of our congregation people is that they are on TikTok all the time, so they'll see our viral video and they'll go to war in the comments for us, which is not something we ask them to do.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. You have some advocates that are-

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. We don't have a team of people ready to do that. We allow them to have that space to also be in community with people on social media on our platform. Then, as many negative comments, there's triple the comments that are dumbfounded that we exist, are grateful that we exist, and will share some really personal things about their church experience in the comments. That is always a beautiful, tender, and delicate experience for us to have. That is when, a lot of times, we'll remind our congregations, "Hey, this presence may not be for you, and that is okay, because there are things that this church that we are still pouring into more than our presence on TikTok, but here's what that's doing for people that you don't even know, and here's what that's doing for people who exist in 1000s of miles away."

My Siri is talking to me. So sorry. It is helpful to have that avenue to show our people who are disenchanted or disengaged with TikTok, see that there is fruit being beared in the connection that we have on those videos, and that's enough for them. We've had videos that we've posted that people have had questions about. We've had videos that we've had congregation members come to us and say, "I don't feel like this is a value of our church," and we've taken it down after discussing together, "Yeah. Maybe it doesn't," and that was very early on in our presence. When I said earlier, now we workshop ideas before we post, and we'll find that, "Okay. Maybe optics wise, that is not the image that we want to give people." I wish I could think of an example, but we don't ever want to create videos of an us-versus-them dichotomy that doesn't feel kind and that feels like it has a different intention than being a positive, inclusive, affirming presence, and that has more of a looking for a fight, which we may have personalities that are like that on staff.

Ryan Dunn:

Right, a little. Yeah.

Katherine Mullen:

But there's responsibility that comes in that public image and making sure that we're staying true to who we preach that we are every week and who our community knows us to be. But I did want to name that not everybody in our church gets it. Not everybody's a fan, but since we've been present on that platform, they have seen the good that it does. And the connection and the engagement that it brings, and that is enough for them to say, "All right. Sounds good."

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah. Cool. And you've used the word values several times, and for me, that seems to be a big key, especially in terms of representing yourselves on TikTok. You're not using TikTok as a platform to inform the church of what the values are. That groundwork has already been done. Last weekend was an example of that. You had this big time of naming the church-wide values, and then you're able to represent those. Really, maybe all this goes down to having that groundwork done in the first place, that knowing what it is that your church values and what it is that it stands for is-

Katherine Mullen:

Absolutely.

Ryan Dunn:

Yeah.

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah.

Ryan Dunn:

And then just hearing that is what separates one church from-

Katherine Mullen:

Yeah. I'm glad you said that, because it goes back to the point of the work that we do and the work that we are called to be doing is not posting videos of TikTok, but it is the messages that we are preaching, and it's the ministry that we're providing our church members. They all know what we're down for, and they all know what we're about. But I would say that our secret sauce to TikTok presence is communicating and speaking about things that not a lot of churches are addressing, that our folks already know that we've been preaching for 10 years, but there are still churches that don't hear that from the pulpit.

There are people that don't hear that from the pulpit. We want to be very clear that we say some things, and we talk about things that are hard, and we ask tough questions because that's a priority of ours. That is in line with who we are, Monday through Sunday. And so we're doing it so that people outside of the church can see that there is a presence there, there's someone in the pulpit talking about hard things and addressing hard things, that we believe, as being called to justice, churches are called to speak on.

Ryan Dunn:

That was a great conversation, wasn't it? If you want to check out more great conversations and episodes of Pastoring in the Digital Parish, that would be so awesome. I'll just say that. A couple of helpful episodes include Season Two's Building Influence through TikTok with Joseph Yoo. That came out in October of 2021, or if you want to talk more about Church Vision, you can check out season three's Leading Your Church's Vision in Digital Ministry with Nicole Riley.

Again, I'm Ryan Dunn. I'd like to thank resourceumc.org, the online destination for leaders throughout the United Methodist Church. They make this podcast possible, and they host our website, pastoringinthedigitalparish.com, where you can find more resources for online ministry or any kind of ministry for that matter. If you want to connect, check out our Pastoring in the Digital Parish Facebook group. You can also send me questions and ideas for future sessions at [email protected]. Another session comes out next week on Wednesday. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful Lent.