According to a Pew Research Center report published in 2023, online church services have been quite popular since the COVID-19 pandemic, with about 22 percent of Christians saying they often watch sermons online. If you also want to try presenting this format of church services on YouTube or any other streaming platform, you will find this helpful article – here, you will find 20 creative church service ideas.
Idea #1: Introduce Your Team to the Audience
The introductory video content opens our list of the best church website content ideas. In general, this type of video is designed for new people to get to know your team. This way, when they decide to visit your church offline, they won't feel awkward. These are usually short videos that are up to a few minutes long.
Idea #2: Make a Video Review of the Event
You can dedicate your video to a specific event in your church. It can be either a recording of an event from beginning to end or stitching together individual moments – it all depends on your video editing skills and chosen engagement strategy.
Idea #3: Livestream Your Church Service
With the current popularity of live streaming itself, you may want to try this video format for your church as well. In particular, live streaming church services may be helpful for those people who, for some reason, were unable to attend the event in person. Please note that you can use pre-recorded videos for church and even stream 24/7 on several platforms to ensure maximum audience coverage. The Gyre tool will help you with this.
Idea #4: Create Children's Content
As people often use YouTube to find safe activities for their children, you can provide them access to your online Sunday church school aimed at young viewers. It will help you introduce them to religion in the most discreet way.
Idea #5: Take an Online Tour of Your Church
It doesn't matter how long ago your church was built. Whether it has historical value – since even regular parishioners are unlikely to have been on all its premises, you can show them what they look like in this type of church social media content.
Idea #6: Teach Your Congregation a New Song
If you will present a new hymn to your parishioners in the coming days, you can publish it on social networks in advance, with subtitles. This way, they will already know the song lyrics at an offline meeting and generally feel more confident.
Idea #7: Tell People About Your Mission
You can share the mission of your church or religion with people. It could be your perspective or an interview with other religious organization members.
Idea #8: Explain the Essence of Church Holidays
If a religious holiday is coming up soon, this could be an excellent opportunity to explain its true meaning to your parishioners. And this can become the next topic for your new video.
Idea #9: Interview Parishioners
You can also shoot video footage of interviews with your parishioners. They can talk about their journey to God and share how their lives changed after they began attending your church.
Idea #10: Demonstrate What You Do Every Day
You can show what goes on behind the scenes in your church. This can be either ready-made, edited content or live video. Note that the first video format can also be used for streaming if you install the supporting software and set up the appropriate church live streaming.
Idea #11: Make a Guide
Try to break down complex religious topics in your video so your audience can better understand the Bible and Christianity. The optimal solution would be presenting your explanations as a guide, including recommendations everyone can apply in everyday life.
Idea #12: Share the History of Your Church
Tell your audience about the history of your church and whether it was built long ago. There may be people in your community who experienced or took part in the reconstruction – in this case, they can share their stories in personal interviews.
Idea #13: Present Parables as Animated Videos
Maybe someone in your religious community knows how to create animated content, or you are ready to hire an outside specialist. This approach to content creation will allow you to visualize parables and present them in the easy-to-perceive form of religious cartoons.
Idea #14: Create a Q&A Video
Creating videos in a question-and-answer format is also on the list of great ideas for church activities. Here, you can cover common questions about religion for your audience, involving other church community members.
Idea #15: Play Out Skits to Explain Difficult Things in a Simple Way
Sometimes, parishioners find it challenging to extract valuable insights from Bible parables, and you can help them with this by acting out skits with your clergy and posting them on your social media profile.
Idea #16: Stream Documentary Content
Our list of ideas for church continues with the creation of documentary videos. It would be an excellent solution if you already have video footage from different years, which can be combined into one or more topics. Such content can gain millions of views due to its historical nature.
Idea #17: Start a Podcast
A great alternative to traditional videos is recording podcasts. They can be either many hours or 5-10 minutes. As a background, you can choose either a static picture or animation – this will allow you to create a full-fledged video and upload it to social media for churches, for example, YouTube or Facebook.
Idea #18: Tell People About Your Cooperation with Other Non-Profit Organizations
One of the most popular online ministry ideas is to demonstrate the results of cooperation with third-party non-profit organizations. In particular, if your church actively helps orphanages or children's hospitals through donations from parishioners, you can create videos demonstrating this.
Idea #19: Showcase Standout Moments from Your Travels
Some priests are involved in active missionary work outside of their church, which is worth your audience's attention. This type of church content will help build trust with your members and demonstrate how they can grow closer to God through similar activities.
Idea #20: Innovate
Perhaps you represent a progressive religious vision and have something to tell your parishioners from a fundamentally different point of view. In particular, you can try to shoot church creatives such as: “Why is Jesus my idol while religion is evil?”, “How has the church discredited itself over the years, and why does this not stop me from believing in God?” etc.
We hope you know how to make a church service enjoyable and will begin implementing at least one of the above church content ideas soon. And, of course, don’t forget to try live streaming, one of the most relevant types of video content today.