How Media to Movement Is Changing Digital Evangelism
Team Expansion’s Media to Movement strategy uses digital media to identify people who are already interested in spiritual conversations and connect them with local disciple-makers. The approach combines targeted online outreach with personal, face-to-face discipleship while creating opportunities for missionaries and remote technical volunteers to serve together.
- Media to Movement uses digital platforms to find spiritual seekers more efficiently and begin meaningful conversations.
- Local disciple-makers remain essential for moving online contacts toward face-to-face discipleship and church formation.
- Digital marketers, developers, cybersecurity professionals, designers, and other specialists can support the strategy remotely.
By Doug Lucas and Paul Fenelon
The past 50 years have witnessed staggering shifts in how the gospel is shared, how communities are formed, and how new believers are nurtured into mature followers of Jesus Christ. When I first started with Team Expansion, working as a missionary in Montevideo, Uruguay, way back in 1982, the digital age was nothing more than a distant speck on the horizon. I remember going door to door, asking if people would like to sign up for a physical correspondence course about Jesus.
The numbers were sobering. Only around three out of 100 doors even answered our knock. And out of the few who did answer, only one out of 100 expressed any genuine interest in learning more about Christ.
Fast forward to the present day. The global landscape has shifted dramatically, and with it, the tools God has placed in our hands. While the eternal truth of the gospel remains entirely unchanged, the mechanism for finding those who are hungering for the truth has been radically revolutionized. Today, many of Team Expansion’s workers employ an innovative approach known as “Media to Movement” (M2M) to bridge the gap between digital interest and local, face-to-face discipleship.
To help Christian Standard readers understand how this works, I sat down with Paul Fenelon (not his real name). After serving on the ground in Central Asia as a frontline missionary for seven years—where he helped launch a pioneering Media to Movement strategy in a highly restricted environment—Paul now serves as the Digital Strategy Specialist for Team Expansion.
How Media to Movement Works
Doug: Can you explain Team Expansion’s Media to Movement strategy and share how it might improve on our 1982 correspondence course approach?
Paul: Team Expansion teams, along with teams from many other missions organizations and churches, are leveraging Media to Movement strategies in many diverse ways around the world today. At its absolute core, M2M is a strategic framework that uses internet media—social media platforms, websites, streaming video, and targeted online advertising—to accelerate the process of finding spiritual seekers, sharing the gospel with them, and connecting them with local disciple-makers who can form offline, face-to-face churches.
One of the most common approaches we use leverages paid advertisements on Meta platforms—such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. We create and distribute video or graphic-based content centered on deep spiritual topics, questions of existential meaning, or stories of hope. These ads are designed to prompt immediate conversations with spiritual seekers, allowing our teams to engage with them online through platforms such as Messenger or WhatsApp.
Using a fishing analogy, traditional methods like the door-knocking you did in Uruguay back in 1982 are very much like fishing with a single pole. You cast your line, wait, reel it in, and move down the bank, spending immense time searching the waters. Media to Movement, by contrast, is more like fishing with a net—and a very unique net at that. In this case, the fish that want to be caught enter the net on purpose. Spiritually interested people see the content, choose to respond, and voluntarily identify themselves to us.
It is vital to understand that this technology does not necessarily increase the actual percentage of potential seekers in a given population. In your 1982 example, there may still only be three out of 100 people in a city who are genuinely open to hearing about Jesus. The modern digital approach cannot change human hearts; only the Holy Spirit can do that. However, what this approach does do is help us find those three people much faster—often for pennies on the dollar. Instead of walking past 97 closed doors to find the three open hearts, the technology allows those three open hearts to text us directly, bypassing the barriers of distance, lockouts, and empty streets.
Early Results in Restricted Mission Fields
Doug: This sounds like a brilliant idea whose time has come. Please tell us briefly how this idea came about and what were some of the early “wins” that proved the concept.
Paul: The genesis of this movement was born out of sheer necessity in highly restricted fields. Nearly a decade ago, a Team Expansion team in North Africa began experimenting with innovative ways to use social media for direct evangelism. They were operating in places where traditional missionaries could not openly walk the streets or knock on doors without facing immediate arrest or deportation.
These pioneering missionaries quickly realized the incredible, unprecedented volume at which they could put gospel-centered content directly in front of people. When you open the digital floodgates, the response can be staggering. This was my own team’s experience when we were stationed in Central Asia. I can say with total confidence that the first two months of running targeted spiritual ads in our target city yielded more genuine spiritual conversations than the previous eight years of more traditional evangelism methods combined.
The People Behind a Media to Movement Strategy
Doug: Exactly how does it work in practice, and what are some of the specific roles that team members play out in such a strategy?
Paul: It takes an entire ecosystem to move a person from clicking on a digital ad to sitting in an offline discovery Bible study. Our team in North Africa came up with distinct roles to maximize successful digital engagement strategy. The Digital Filterer or Online Responder is ideally a believer from the target people group who manages the daily influx of online messages and comments. The Multiplier is responsible for the vital task of following up with and discipling contacts that have successfully passed through the initial digital “filter” and show a serious interest in Christianity. These individuals are the boots on the ground. The Dispatcher is the administrative backbone, responsible for ensuring that each contact—whether they are ready to meet offline or are still asking questions online—does not fall through the cracks. The Marketer is the tech-savvy person who manages the organic and paid social media strategies, builds the graphic campaigns, monitors the ad budgets, and uses data analytics to refine our approach, ensuring we are reaching the right audiences with the right messages. A Visionary Leader keeps the team accountable to their spiritual goals, coordinates funding, and helps support the team’s ongoing operational and spiritual needs. Cybersecurity Engineers ensure the ironclad protection of our data, our servers, and our users’ devices. Risk and Compliance Officers make sure the project adheres to relevant data privacy laws. IT Directors and Developers develop digital tools and provide professional-level, enterprise support in this technical arena.
Encouraging Results from Digital Evangelism
Doug: It’s tough to predict results with any kingdom strategy, as there are always so many variables, cultures, and spiritual environments at play. But what are some of the more encouraging results we’re seeing so far? Please share some real-life impact stories with our readers.
Paul: The fruit we are seeing across the globe is incredibly encouraging, proving that the Holy Spirit is using these pathways to transform lives. Our team in Central Asia launched a mobile Bible app that has now been downloaded well over 80,000 times and maintains a steady base of 4,000 current active users. From that digital app alone, our team averages between 30 to 50 deep, substantive spiritual conversations every single month as local people discover the Word of God in their own language for the very first time in their lives.
Another team I had the privilege of serving with in Central Asia reached an astounding 128,000 people from an unengaged, unreached people group in a nearby, highly restricted country with a clear gospel presentation in their heart language. The total cost for that massive reach? Only $99 in targeted ad spend.
How Remote Workers Can Join the Mission
Doug: Are there any jobs within this ecosystem that remote workers can do? How might a Christian Standard reader help out? And if they feel called, how would someone apply?
Paul: Absolutely! One of the most beautiful aspects of Media to Movement is that many of these critical roles can be done completely remotely from anywhere in the world. I personally manage not only our own project in Central Asia, but also coordinate many other global projects, right from Team Expansion’s main office here at Emerald Hills in Louisville, Kentucky.
People who are fluent in target international languages could easily help do online responding from their own living rooms anywhere on the globe. Those who are gifted in graphic design, animation, or videography could help develop localized content for churches and mission teams to deploy in their Media to Movement strategies.
The global church, missionaries, and local believers are in desperate need of developers, cybersecurity engineers, graphic designers, videographers, Microsoft and Google Workspace administrators, digital marketers, and other highly skilled professional volunteers. Many of these foundational roles can be done remotely, on a part-time basis, or as a volunteer commitment alongside your regular career.
Team Expansion has been profoundly blessed by several technical volunteers who donate their time, and I would love to see more young IT professionals, database managers, and developers feeling a distinct call to missions. They can use their modern corporate skill sets to help develop, manage, and secure these digital platforms that make M2M possible.
As we look at the vast landscape of a digital world, it is easy to become discouraged by the noise, the distractions, and the darkness often found online. But as Paul has shown us, these exact same digital highways can be reclaimed for the Great Commission.
Whether it is through knocking on doors in Uruguay or building secure databases in Kentucky, the mission remains identical: finding those who are lost and walking with them into a deep, life-transforming discipleship relationship with Jesus Christ. We invite you to join us on this digital frontier.
(If you’d like to become involved in digital evangelism, please visit https://teamexpansion.org/media2movement-disciple-makers/ )
Doug Lucas purchased his first computer in 1983. Today, his phone is way more powerful than that machine ever was. He has served as Team Expansion’s President since its beginning in a dorm-room prayer meeting in 1978. Paul Fenelon is a pseudonym for security’s sake. Learn more about Team Expansion at www.TeamExpansion.org .
