Making Disciples of All Nation: How to Take Your Live Stream Global

Consider this: How can your church reach the nations without digital tools? While possible, leveraging digital technology is undeniably more cost-effective and scalable.

As church leaders, you likely have Matthew 28’s The Great Commission burned into your psyche. “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20). 

Technologically speaking, we have the power to reach the ends of the earth! The Great Commission instructs us to do more than just reach. How can you use your live stream to reach, engage, and equip the nations for Christ?

Churches do an incredible job of connecting with people every week. In the physical space, churches like yours actively create content that debuts on Sunday mornings at 9 a.m. Whether it’s the sermon, musical worship, dramas, or videos, a lot of work goes into crafting the physical worship service to connect with your church’s physical attendees.

Some churches even translate their services into different languages. Recognizing that people connect best in their “heart-language,” churches use radio transmitters and receivers to transmit volunteers live-translating the musical worship and teaching from English into different languages. It’s common in some worship centers or sanctuaries to hear the whisper of translation in another language from headphones scattered around the room. Churches like this recognize the potential to connect with a different audience, even within their physical reach. 

“GO” = Using Church Livestream to Connect with People Groups Digitally.

Due to COVID, many churches have taken the next step and started broadcasting their musical worship and message online. This is a great way to connect with your physical attendees when not in the building. Some churches have even gone as far as using online broadcasts to communicate with a new audience… people who are not within physical reach of your building.

What if we connected the dots here? What if we, in addition to English (the language spoken on the stage), also broadcast our online services in another language? Is your church service already using volunteers to translate that service into Spanish? What if you broadcast that service online with the Spanish translation? Do you have another people group or language prevalent within your church’s community? What if you empowered them to help you use the church service to connect with their culture and people group digitally?

Churches like Christ Fellowship Miami have used online broadcasts to build international audiences using services translated into multiple languages. They’ve even used these online audiences to group people into micro church gatherings, even launching global campuses internationally. You can use your church services to connect with a worldwide audience online!

As with most things digitally, however, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There are several factors to consider before intentionally live-streaming your church services to an international audience:

“MAKE DISCIPLES” = Establish a Digital Community and Invite Your International Audience. 

I helped a physical church in Miami once develop their digital strategy, which led me to a 1:1 conversation with their lead pastor. Sitting down with the man, I heard his evangelistic passion firsthand. He was a dynamic communicator, and every sentence he spoke was filled with emotion. In the meeting, he told me he wanted to see the world’s people come to Christ through his sermons. 

He gave the example: “Jeff, I want to see people in Egypt get baptized because of my sermon. Can you help us do that digitally?” I smiled at my pastor friend and asked him. “What happens to that person in Egypt after he gets baptized? What’s his next step?” My pastor friend replied coldly, “I don’t know, Jeff. That’s not my problem.”

If our churches are going to engage in international ministry and actively enact the Great Commission on a global scale, we have to be more than “evangelists.” Responsibility for discipleship must be our problem! We can, of course, intentionally pass that responsibility onto someone else…maybe we partner with a denominational missionary in that space or work with a digital church that’s more comfortable with digital discipleship… or perhaps it’s time to establish our own culture of digital discipleship.

To that end, I want to remind you that (and this should not surprise any church leader) discipleship happens best in community. Making disciples can also occur in digital communities. Whether the person lives across the street from your physical campus, or on the other side of the planet, digital communities can be used to establish relationships and build trust. We even see evangelism and discipleship increase in effectiveness in the context of digital community. And that includes digital communities connecting with people on the other side of the planet.

In many ways, digital communities are more viable internationally than in the United States. Over 2 billion people have active WhatsApp accounts, with less than 100 million in the U.S. Even in impoverished third-world countries, people have access to smartphones with internet access. So, the ability to connect with people digitally is possible.

Do you have people within your church who understand the international communities you’re engaging with? That is not required for your church’s digital community, but it is an added benefit! Whoever is managing your community (commonly called a community “moderator”) needs to understand the cultures interacting with your community, and that US culture should not be the primary driver within the community. If anything, let “Christ” be the continuity within your community that connects all of us internationally. You can never go wrong praying for people and sharing scriptures within digital communities. Trust is built on nothing less.

“Baptize” and “Teach” lead towards “Equipping.” Time to think Multiplication

The Great Commission calls us to “Go” and “Make Disciples” of all nations… but it doesn’t stop at making disciples! We’re challenged to “baptize” and “teach them to obey” Jesus’ commands. As we go international, our challenge is not to gather international viewers to watch our online streams… but to scatter people on a mission globally. What if we viewed our international attendees as potential church planters and treated them as such, equipping them with the ability to teach the Gospel?

I had a personal experience with this. You can read the story in greater detail here, but the TL:DR version is that when I was a digital pastor, an online viewer from Kenya emailed me. Instead of asking for a $2.4 million loan, he asked me to be discipled. So, we did that. 

We aggressively discipled him. As a result, he started a house church that exploded. We would teach him lessons on Thursday, and he would turn around and teach his church those lessons on Sunday. He started traveling his countryside, teaching others the lessons, and they began planting churches. Many believed. He even got to where he started touring internationally, teaching pastors what he had learned. Due to our simple investment of time in one man in Kenya, thousands heard the Gospel, and many believed. Notice what I said: we never spent a dime on this man. We only invested time.

As an aside, what if we also thought about aggressively discipling our American viewers this way? What would God do with a movement of missionaries globally empowered via digital methods? Gathering people in a digital worship center to watch a video is vital. Still, it is just the beginning of what God can do through your church digitally if we connect and utilize community to equip people digitally and mobilize them to be the church physically and digitally.