In the fourth episode of Connected, Ben Hollebon comes back to the tools — the walk-through promised at the close of Episode 3.

He opens with a word about the gap. It's been longer than usual between episodes, and there's a good reason: the programme has been finalising its discovery report — the full write-up of everything heard across the listening conversations, the Have Your Say form and the postcards. That report is now finished and about to be published. It will go up on the website for anyone to read, and be sent directly to everyone who took part.

Then, five things the Digital Transformation Programme is exploring — every one of them traced back to something a real person said in the listening. A free, hosted website for any of the 775 churches currently with no web presence at all. A simpler, free way for a circuit to keep its records, built around the way Methodism actually works rather than bent out of shape to fit something designed for a different kind of church. Better data, so the Church can know itself and trust what it sees. The Connexion app, putting daily discipleship one tap away — and the open question of whether the right answer is one app or a small family of them. And underneath all of it, the digital confidence and training without which none of the tools work.

Honest throughout that the programme is early, and that much of this is still being scoped or prototyped rather than shipped. This episode is for anyone who wants to see the shape of what the programme is building — and where it came from.

Before I start today, a word about why it's been a while. It's been longer than usual

since the last episode, and you deserve to know why. We've spent these last few weeks

finishing the Discovery Report, the full write-up of everything we heard across all those listening

conversations we've been having. It's the foundation the rest of this programme stands

on, so we wanted to get it right rather than rush it out of the door. It's done now and

it's coming very shortly. It will go up on the website for anyone to read, and we'll

send it straight to everyone who took part. If you gave us your time, it will find its

way to you somehow. Thank you for your patience while we got it finished.

At the end of the last episode, I promised that this one would come back to the tools properly

this time. The last episode was about how we're working, the method behind the programme. This

one is the other half of that. Less of the working method, more of the working. So this

is me walking you through what we're actually exploring. The things that might, in time,

make a few corners of Methodist life a little easier. I'll keep it plain, no jargon, no acronyms,

nothing you'd need a glossary for. Two honest warnings before I start. The first is that we're

early. Almost everything I'm about to describe is being sketched out, or built as a rough version,

or tested with a handful of churches. Not finished, not rolled out, not on its way to your circuit next

week. Some of it will change as we keep listening. Some of it might not survive at all. The second

warning is that I'm going to do this as just me again, talking it through rather than bringing in a

guest. There'll be time for those conversations. Today, I just want to give you the map. And there's

a thread running through all of it that I want you to hold on to. Every single one of these ideas came

from something a real person told us. Not from a strategy document, not from a clever idea in a

meeting. From the listening. The tools follow what people said they needed, not the other way around.

This is Connected, the audio series about the Methodist Church's digital transformation programme.

I'm Ben Hollebon, and this is the tools that could help.

Let me start with the one that surprised me the most when the numbers came back.

We did a piece of work earlier this year, a digital landscape audit, which is a grand name for

something quite simple. We went and looked church by church across the whole Connexion to see who had

a presence online, a working website, a Facebook page, anything at all that someone searching for

a Methodist church near them might actually find. And what we found is that 775 churches have no web

presence whatsoever. No website, no social media, nothing. That's roughly one in five Methodist

churches. That is, to all intents and purposes, invisible to anyone looking for them online. A bit

more than half, 58%, have a working website. The rest are somewhere in between, with a page here or a

listing there, but nothing you could really call a home. Now, sit with what that means for a moment.

Someone moves to a new town. They've been a Methodist all their life, or they're curious for the first time,

and they do what everyone does. They get their phone out, and they search.

And for one in five of our churches, there is simply nothing to find. The church might be warm and alive

and full of people on a Sunday morning, but online, it doesn't exist. That isn't a failing on the part of

those churches. More often than not, it's the churches with the least time, the fewest volunteers and the

smallest budgets that have nothing online, because building and looking after a website has always cost

money, or know-how, or both. So the gap isn't about willingness. It's about access. So one of the things

we're exploring is straightforward. A free website for any church that wants one. Hosted for them, so there's

nothing to pay and no server to worry about. Simple enough that a volunteer can keep it up to date without

being technical, tied into the Church Finder tool on the main Methodist website, so that when someone

searches, the church actually comes up. Nobody would be made to have one, but for the churches that have

been locked out of having a presence online, the door would be open, and it would be free. That's at the

scoping stage at the moment, but of everything in the programme, it's the one where I can see most clearly

the shape of the difference it would make. The second one came up in almost every listening

conversation I had, in one form or another, and it's the least glamorous thing imaginable, which is

probably why it matters so much. Running a circuit involves keeping track of an enormous amount of

information. Who the members are, who's being DBS checked and when that runs out, who's doing what role,

the children's and youth work, with all the safeguarding that rightly sits around it,

buildings, bookings, finances. And at the moment, most circuits hold all of that in some combination

of spreadsheets, paper files, a system somebody set up years ago that only one person understands,

and honestly, memory. I heard one story of a circuit that spent a serious amount of money

on an off-the-shelf system, and then found it didn't fit, because it had been built for a single

congregation, not for the way a Methodist circuit actually works, with churches and a circuit and a

district all stacked together. Methodism has a particular shape, and most of the systems out there

weren't built for it. Here's a thing that genuinely surprised me when I learned this.

For a denomination of our size, we're almost the only one without a shared way of doing this.

Other traditions have a system that most of their churches use. We don't. Every circuit has,

more or less, had to work it out for themselves. So, we're exploring what it would look like to have

a simple, free, browser-based way for a circuit to keep its records in one place. Membership.

Roles. The compliance side. With the system quietly reminding you that someone's DBS check is coming up

for renewal in a few months, rather than you finding out it lapsed two years ago. Built around the way

Methodism is actually structured, not bent out of shape to fix something designed for a different

kind of church. The third one sounds a bit dry when I say it out loud, but stay with me, because it sits

underneath everything else. The programme needs the Church to have good information about itself,

and at the moment, we don't. Let me give you the simplest possible example. If you asked me how many

Methodist churches are there, you'd think there'd be one answer. There isn't. Four systems, four answers.

Not because anyone's been careless, but because the systems were built at different times,

for different reasons, and they've never properly talked to each other. Most of the time that doesn't

matter much, but it does matter more than you'd think. If the data held about a church is wrong,

the wrong address, an old minister's name, a phone number that stopped working years ago,

then the person searching for that church online finds a broken listing. A campaign that wants to

point people to their nearest Methodist church can't quite trust where it's sending them, and local

churches, very reasonably, stop believing what the data says about them, because they can see it's out

of date. So part of the programme is patient, unglamorous work to put that right. Better foundations

underneath the data, so the systems can actually share what they know. And, just as importantly,

a person whose job it is to go out to districts, and circuits, and churches, and help them check and

update their own records. The fourth one is the one people get most excited about. So let me try to be

honest about what it is, and what it isn't. We're looking at building an app, a proper one, for your

phone, iPhone or Android. It's called Connexion, and the first version is deliberately, almost stubbornly

simple. It's all about daily discipleship, the everyday rhythm of faith. Here's the thing, the

Methodist Church already has some genuinely good daily content. Prayer for the Day, A Word in Time,

A Methodist Way of Life, prayers you can turn to. But at the moment, all of that lives on the website,

where it has to compete for attention with property forms, and governance pages, and everything else.

So if you want to build a daily habit of prayer, you have to go and dig it out, every single day.

And most people, understandably, don't. Other traditions worked this out a decade ago.

The Church of England has had a daily prayer app for years. There are apps people love and open every single

morning. We've had the content all along. We just haven't put it somewhere people can reach in one tap.

First thing, before the day swallows them. So that's what the first version of the Connexion app could be.

Your church's daily prayer and reflection. One tap from your home screen. No streaks. No "you've broken your run of 17 days".

None of that. That is how fitness apps work. And it's exactly the wrong spirit for prayer.

Grace doesn't keep a tally of the days you missed. The app shouldn't either.

And there's a bigger question sitting just behind it, which opened up a few weeks ago, and which I find genuinely interesting.

We started by thinking about an app. One Methodist app.

But the more we listened, the more it became clear that we're actually asking one website and one idea of an app

to serve completely different people.

Someone exploring faith for the first time.

A worship leader planning Sunday morning.

A church treasurer or safeguarding officer carrying real administrative weight.

Those are three different people with three different needs.

And trying to serve all of them through a single front door is part of what makes the current experience so cluttered.

So, the question we're now working through is this.

Is the right answer one app, or a small family of them?

Each one simple, each one doing one job well for one kind of person.

The daily discipleship app Connexion could be the first of those either way.

But we're stepping back to think about the whole shape before we build,

rather than bolting things on one at a time until we've made the same cluttered mess all over again, just on a phone.

There's one more thing, and in a way it's the most important, because without it, none of the rest works.

A tool is only of use if the person it's for feels able to pick it up.

And one of the clearest things I've heard across the whole listening exercise

is people saying, in lots of different ways,

"I'm not very techie."

"I want to, but I don't know how."

One district put it perfectly.

They said, "What people need is a 101 guide.

Permission to be a beginner.

And someone alongside them when they find their feet."

Now that stuck with me, because it reframes the whole challenge.

The gap, mostly, isn't that people don't want to engage.

It's willing, but unable.

The will is there.

What's missing is the confidence, and the support, to build it.

So, none of these tools goes out on its own.

Alongside them, we're planning proper digital skills support.

Built for people who describe themselves as beginners.

Not for people who are already comfortable.

Training that comes through the districts, in plain language.

In whatever format works for you.

Whether that's a short video, a written guide, or a real person on a call.

And a train-the-trainer approach, so that every circuit can grow its own local digital champions.

Someone nearby, who knows you, who you can actually ask.

Because the measure of all of this was never going to be how clever the tools are.

It's whether the person they were built for feels able, and supported, to use them.

If we get the websites, and the systems, and the apps right, but leave people feeling that it's all for someone more confident than them,

we'll have failed at the only thing that actually matters.

So, that's the map.

A free website for every church that wants one.

A simpler way to run a circuit.

Better information so the Church can know itself and trust what it sees.

An app that puts daily prayer one tap away.

And the bigger question of one app, or a family of them.

And underneath it all, the patient work of helping people feel confident enough to use any of it at all.

I'll say again what I said at the start.

We are early.

Some of this is barely a sketch.

I'd far rather tell you what we're thinking while it's still rough, and you can shape it,

than wait until it's finished, and hand it to you done.

That's the whole spirit of the thing.

And every one of these came from someone telling us what would help.

We've now sat down, covering all of the districts, with more conversations still in the diary.

And we've heard from many more people through forms, emails, and other means too.

All of that is gathered up in the Discovery Report I mentioned at the start,

which is going to be landing any day now, and which you'll be able to read in full.

If you've got a perspective, the one thing in Methodist life that a better digital tool could make easier,

or a worry about any of this, there are a few ways in.

The form is at methodist.org.uk/dtp-haveyoursay,

or you can email me directly at [email protected].

For now, thank you for listening.

This is all being built on what you tell us, in the open, by people you can hold to account.

Tell me what would help, and you'll help shape what we build next.

I'm Ben Hollebon, and this is Connected.