My husband is a kids pastor. Fifteen-plus years of Sunday mornings, goldfish crackers, and middle schoolers who act too cool for the lesson and then ask the realest questions you’ve ever heard at 9:40 on a Wednesday night.
I’ve spent those same years in marketing. So I live with one foot in each world – the world that counts conversions and the world that counts souls. And I need to tell you something I keep watching happen: ministry is borrowing its scoreboard from the algorithm, and it’s making leaders sick.
The wrong scoreboard
The algorithm has one question: how many. How many views, how many likes, how many followers, how many seats. It’s not evil. It’s just a machine that counts what it can see.
But ministry was never supposed to be a numbers game. Heaven counts different things. Faithfulness. Obedience. The one kid who finally believes he’s loved. The volunteer who keeps showing up when nobody claps.
The algorithm counts what’s visible. God counts what’s faithful.
When a ministry leader starts refreshing analytics the way they used to open their Bible, something has flipped. The tool became the scoreboard. And the scoreboard became the calling.
You are called, not followed
Here’s what I tell churches and ministries when we work together: your message matters too much to be shaped by a machine’s appetite. The machine wants outrage, novelty, and frequency. Your people need truth, consistency, and care.
That doesn’t mean ignore the tools. I build marketing strategies for a living – I believe in the tools. Use them. Post the clip. Send the email. But decide who you are before you open the app, or the app will decide for you.
Clarity before content. The sentence before the post. Who are we, what are we actually saying, who is it for? Ministry leaders who can answer that in one breath stop getting tossed around by every trend.
What faithfulness actually looks like online
Faithfulness online looks boring from the outside. It’s the same message, said clearly, for years. It’s replying to the comment nobody else saw. It’s posting encouragement whether forty people see it or four thousand.
It’s also honest. People can smell performed faith from a mile away. The ministries that actually grow – the healthy kind of growing – are the ones that sound like a person, not a brand deck.
A better question
So here’s the question I want to leave with every pastor, kids director, and ministry leader reading this: not “how is my content performing?” but “is my message clear, and am I being faithful with it?”
The algorithm will never applaud your faithfulness. It can’t. It only counts what’s visible, and the most important things you do are not.
Post the clip. Say the true thing clearly. Then close the app and go love the actual people in front of you.
Called, not followed. That’s the whole assignment.
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