Connecting across Christmas
By Kelly Woods
The Advent season can be a great opportunity for communities to try new ways to connect, as well as engage more widely with the community. Here are 10 specific ways you could enhance your digital connections in the lead-up to Christmas:
1. Devotionals: You could create daily or weekly devotionals that can help unpack the themes of Advent. Creating these as sharable posts/links to use across your socials or emails helps people to engage and share them more widely. They could be videos, podcasts, images or written pieces.
2. Online study group: You could take the opportunity to do this in the lead up to Christmas, or even after Christmas across the break. On the lead up to Christmas, you could explore a theme, book or topic connected to the Advent season. After the Christmas celebration you could take the opportunity to offer a ‘faith 101’ study – this can help people who would like a chance to reconnect with the basics of the Christian story, as well as offer a chance for visitors across this time of year to take the next step in their faith explorations.
3. Online prayer: Across Advent you could encourage a commitment to prayer together by hosting online prayer groups. Along with fostering community support, this could serve as a chance to pray for those around the world.
4. Social media campaigns: If you have a social media platform, you could share uplifting messages, community events and scripture. Take the time to encourage your community members to share their reflection on the posts.
5. Livestreaming: If you livestream your services, make sure people know where to find the service. While leading the service, you might like to include interactive elements for people online to engage with, and make sure you have someone online to chat with those who might be commenting through the service.
6. Acts of service: You could connect with a local charity for an online donation drive – or even take the plunge and create your own online donation drive for a specific community or program in need.
7. Advent calendar challenge: You could create a digital Advent calendar that helps families connect together with daily activities or challenges for them to do together at home.
8. Connect nights: You could host online gatherings where people share their at-home activities with one another. These could look like cooking nights, craft nights or even a trivia night where families work together as a team. If your families are more tech savvy, you might like to incorporate gaming within these nights, such as Minecraft.
9. Music and worship: You could offer an online carols night. By only streaming to an online audience, and leaving the chatroom open, you create the chance to offer connections for those specifically engaging digitally with your community. This could even include people messaging in requests.
10. Outreach and connection: Make sure that you motivate your community to reach out to friends and family across this time, and perhaps even set up a buddy system for those who lack family connections. A phone call or message during this season can go a long way.
Remember, these are just ideas and there are many more that can help people connect together – the digital world can be used as more than just a tool to point to activities happening at places; it can also be used as a gathering space, a point of connection and a way to link people together.