30/01/2025
We love to share stories of what different churches are exploring and learning through digital tools. In this blog, guest contributor Rev Dr Lee Barford from St Stephen’s Church in Westminster tells us about how his church runs annual online panel discussions to equip Christians for the digital sphere.
The need: raising awareness and education
Many Christians sense that they should respond in a faith-based way to challenges such as:
Disruptive technology advancements - a current example is huge increase in the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Climate change - climate change is driven by consumer and policy choices about energy-consuming technologies such as transport and building heating and cooling
However, making such responses is complicated by:
Rapid change in these technologies
Lack of understanding of how they affect people (especially the “least of us”)
How these relate to loving our neighbour as ourselves
So, raising awareness and education are required.
Our response: an expert-led virtual conference
We at St Stephen’s Church in Westminster are addressing these needs through an annual series of panel discussions between experts in these issues and Christian responses to them. Each discussion is a structured conversation where three or four experts with different perspectives on the topic discuss it in front of the audience. The discussion is facilitated by a moderator who guides the conversation. The moderator allows for questions from the audience. The goal is to share knowledge, insights, and diverse viewpoints. To maximise the quality of the panelists we attract and the audience we can reach, we decided from the beginning to use Zoom to host these discussions. All speakers and the audience are remote.
Being fully virtual also allows us to involve volunteers from abroad to identify and recruit speakers, and publicise the discussions in their areas. For example, we’ve had speakers and audiences from New York City and Silicon Valley by working with people from Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Manhattan and the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real in California.
We’ve had a total of four ‘God and the Machine’ panel discussions in the last two years. Two panels in 2023 were about AI. Two in 2024 were about climate change and creation care.
How to run a panel discussion on Zoom
There are several steps that are different when holding a panel on Zoom or any other teleconferencing service compared to holding a board meeting or broadcasting a church service.
Schedule the discussions in the Zoom application well in advance, even months early. That way, you can provide a link to the Zoom meeting to the panelists and moderator in advance so they can log in to it quickly. Having the meeting link early also allows you to put the link into your publicity for the event. For example, you can put it in web pages or as a QR code on printed announcements, church bulletins, or posters
We chose to put recordings of the panel discussions on YouTube, to be longer-term educational resources. If you want to make and provide recordings, get permission from the panelists for recording when you recruit them. Links to the recordings can be found here and here
Assign meeting management roles in advance. There need to be people to do the following without unnecessary discussion during the meeting:
Start the meeting
Admit the moderator, panelists, and audience at the proper times
Start the recording
Ask the audience to keep their cameras off and microphones muted
Choose among the questions in the chat and send them as direct chat messages to the moderator. This relieves the moderator of having to monitor the main meeting chat whilst thinking about how to guide the discussion
On one occasion we had a panel with a disruptive audience member. We now also assign in advance someone to identify and remove from the meeting anyone intentionally interfering with the conversation
Have participants enter the meeting early. We ask the people with the above roles, the moderator, and the panelists to join the meeting fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the event. This gives time to fix microphone and camera problems and briefly review the event format before the audience starts listening
Remember to start the recording
We also keep on the parish website a page for each group of sessions. There, we give basic information about each panel (date, participants, moderator) and the link to the recording.
While we haven't done a formal survey, in conversations with people who watched the conference sessions they said that they found them informative, thought-provoking, and that they intended to attend next year. On the other hand, the current format does have the disadvantage of making several people prepare for relatively little speaking time each. We are discussing changing the format to give more time to speak and answer questions to fewer participants. Given the astounding improvements in capabilities in AI already this year, that will be this autumn's topic.
If you have any questions about our 'God and the Machine’ Zoom sessions you can contact [email protected].
- Rev Dr Lee Barford, St Stephen with St John, Rochester Row
