Karina Gutiérrez Seguel & Mario Bravo-Lamas. July 26, 2025
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“At the global level, people spent an average of approximately 7 hours a day in front of a screen in 2020, and this figure is projected to increase by 2050. For most of the world, the digital age is shaping our relationships, desires, brain chemistry, decision-making, character, and our faith formation to follow the way of Jesus.” Fourth Lausanne Congress, 2024
Digital mission as a contemporary expression of the church
We live in a world where digital is no longer an accessory, but an essential part of everyday life. People get informed, converse, work, and seek meaning through their screens. In this context, a vital question arises for today’s church: can the Christian community flourish in a digital environment? The answer is a clear and hopeful yes.
Beta.Church was born as a hybrid and missional church, deeply committed to spiritual formation, seeking to reach those who have drifted away from faith or have never been part of a church without diluting the gospel. We do this because we recognize that many people have been hurt by religious experiences, others simply cannot find a healthy Christian community nearby, and many more would only feel comfortable exploring faith from the safety of their own space—like those who would never cross a church threshold but would accept an invitation to connect from their safe space. Or those who need accompaniment in their process before they can trust or commit to a Christian community.
We began digitally not out of convenience, but out of conviction. Because that’s where people live today. And because we believe the gospel has something profound and beautiful to say in homes, video calls, and social media posts. This approach is not a concession to comfort, but a strategic and pastoral response to the contemporary context. We don’t reduce the church to digital, but we do embrace it as a legitimate and fruitful mission field.
In this way, Beta.Church seeks to break physical barriers to bring discipleship and Christian community where people actually are—often in the intimacy of their screens, homes, their vulnerability, and search for meaning.
A biblical and pastoral approach for a new time
“Instead of treating digital tools as promotional platforms, what if we adopted them as spaces for the embodied presence of Christ?” Jesse Carbo
In Acts 1:8 we are told that the church needed to cross different boundaries to reach others with the testimony of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit; power that not only fuels witness and community life but contextualizes Christ to people so that everyone can hear the wonders of God in their own culture (see Acts 2:11).
The early church saw different spaces as places of worship, including homes that, with the presence of the Holy Spirit, were transformed into centers of prayer, teaching, and fellowship (Acts 2:42–47). Thus, we hope that with the presence of the Holy Spirit we will be the church wherever we gather, including digital spaces.
Moreover, we must see this through Christ’s incarnational paradigm, which invites us not only to transmit a message but to live relationally in the communities where God places us, including digital spaces. As Jesse Carbo says, citing missional theology fathers Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch, the church is born anew in every new context and culture:
“If the digital world of the 21st century is a new context, then faithful mission will require the church to embody the gospel anew within digital culture, to effectively translate the unchanging gospel into the language, symbols, and practices of online life.” Jesse Carbo
In this line, the Lausanne Congress 2024 affirmed that today the Great Commission must consider that “The complexity of the digital landscape requires evangelistic efforts to intentionally cross digital borders, going beyond simply sharing or forwarding Christian memes on isolated social networks.”
The idea of starting and integrating digital spaces is not about a trend or an empty strategy, it is the creative update of deeply biblical principles. We seek to reach the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8), and today that includes social networks, podcasts, WhatsApp groups. Our conviction is that the church’s mission has not changed, but its forms have. In a world where much of human community happens online, the church is called to inhabit that space with authenticity, compassion, and depth.
A hybrid strategy: from digital to in-person
“At the beginning of 2025, Chile had 18.6 million Internet users, with an online penetration rate of 94.1 percent. In January 2025, Chile had 14.8 million social media user identities, equivalent to 74.7 percent of the total population”. Digital 2025, Chile
Our church planting project is designed in two stages: the first is one hundred percent digital, and then it will expand to in-person spaces. In the first stage, we hope to create spaces for evangelism, spiritual formation, and online community, including presence on social media (https://www.instagram.com/beta.church/; https://www.tiktok.com/@beta.church), digital discipleship spaces, and conducting digital evangelistic courses from the Alpha ministry (https://pruebaalpha.org).
Four pillars of Beta.Church’s digital ministry:
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“Warming up”: devotional content on Instagram and TikTok; From June 2025.
2. Evangelism and discipleship: small groups of prayer, discipleship and evangelism (Alpha) on Zoom; From August 2025.
3. Community: creating community spaces via Instagram broadcast channels or private WhatsApp groups; From October 2025.
4. Worship: live worship meetings (Tiktok, Youtube, or Twitch); From December 2025.
In a second stage, we will hold small group meetings in homes, universities, halls, cafés, or open spaces, with the purpose of evangelizing, building community, and discipleship; for this, along with implementing Alpha groups, discipleship spaces, and worship gatherings, we will also explore formats like book clubs, participation in university activities, or community service actions—such as beach cleanups—that allow us to connect with the community. All this will be part of a proposal that contextualizes and translates faith in a theologically sound way, engaging with the difficult questions of today’s world and accompanying both conversion processes and faith reconstruction journeys.
The digital stage will allow us to consolidate the discernment process we began in 2023. Our interest is to move to an area with little presence of contemporary evangelical churches, such as the area of Concón, in the Valparaiso region, where our denomination, the Free Methodist Church, is not yet present. Our focus, at this stage, remains the same: to reach those without a church and avoid “sheep shifting.” In this, we dream of communities that celebrate faith with creativity, depth, and beauty. We long to collaborate with God in forming a healthy, vibrant, intergenerational, contextualized community centered on Jesus and committed to reflecting His love in everyday life.
During this time, we pray for those who will join this project, whether as part of the ministry team or as people committed to support through prayer and offerings. Meanwhile, we are progressing in several key areas: establishing an institutional connection with a church, board, or committee of the Free Methodist Church of Chile to formally accompany us as a sponsoring agency under ¶6810 of the Book of Discipline; forming a ministry team of 2 to 3 people with a strong missional and spiritual formation calling; organizing regular prayer meetings open to those who wish to join; and raising the necessary funds to sustain the project, thus inviting others to actively participate in God’s mission in this way.
Why is this project important today, in Chile?
“Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” G. K. Chesterton
In today’s Chilean context, deeply marked by growing secularism, disaffection with institutional religion, and an increasing crisis of meaning—especially among younger generations—we believe it is urgent to rethink how the church presents itself and is lived out. Today, 44% of young Chileans identify with no religion (UC Bicentennial Survey 2023), while 80% of Chileans still believe that faith can help in times of crisis (IPSOS 2023). Globally, there is also a renewed interest in Jesus among millennials and Gen Z, although not necessarily in traditional forms of church. This confirms that the problem is not faith itself, but how we communicate, live, and embody it. Additionally, many people have drifted away from faith or never found a space to explore it with freedom, authenticity, and depth. Therefore, we want to offer an accessible, warm, meaningful space, centered on Christ and guided by the Spirit.
This requires providing greater biblical knowledge presented in ways relevant to new generations, taking small steps to reach out to those around us, answering difficult questions, having a strong commitment to discipleship (lived faith), and holding more welcoming gatherings. As Angela Halili mentions in the podcast Girls Gone Bible: “I see people meet Jesus, but they have no idea how to follow Him or live according to the Word. They have no community.” Thus, Beta.Church emerges as a hybrid missional community (digital and in-person) that seeks to offer a different path: accessible but deep, modern but biblical, relational but Christ-centered, hybrid but incarnational, missional and formative. In the words of Dave Ripper in Experiencing Scripture as a Disciple of Jesus, “spiritual formation was never conceived as an add-on to the work of the church, because spiritual formation is the mission of the church.” Therefore, we want to form mature disciples who live their faith from Monday to Sunday, in their homes, workplaces, social networks, and relationships. In this context, we will understand discipleship not as consuming content, but as following Jesus together, step by step, in community, both digitally and in person.
How does this project align with the Free Methodist vision?
“Believers meet regularly for fellowship, mutual edification, and equipping (The Free Methodist Church intends to be representative of what the church of Jesus Christ should be on earth. Therefore, it requires a specific commitment regarding the faith and life of its members ¶121; see Acts 2:42; Romans 12:4-6)”. Book of Discipline 2023, Free Methodist Church, ¶6070
This approach is fully aligned with the Free Methodist Church, which promotes the planting of community churches as “an integrated process in which disciples make disciples as they engage in the ministry of establishing new churches in communities needing more churches.” This is part of the models of doing church in small groups, which we will seek to implement from the Methodist tradition, and the pursuit of mutual participation in the process of knowing Christ and spiritual formation. Thus, fostering the formation of others to work as a team, in accordance with the priesthood of all believers. The platform best suited to this model is Disciple-Making Church Planting (DCP), in which bi-vocational workers are strategically placed to plant communities. Consistent with this, we dedicate the other half of our occupation to biblical and spiritual formation in seminaries and projects like cristoforma.org.
These convictions are also in accordance with the 2023 Book of Discipline of the Free Methodist Church, especially as expressed in the following paragraphs:
¶122: “According to the word of God and the custom of the early church, public worship, prayer, and the administration of the sacraments should be conducted in a language understood by the people.”
¶6070: Believers who gather are united in loving covenant fellowship around the Trinitarian presence of the One True God: the Father, the Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit (see Matthew 28:19; John 14:26).
¶6800: The fulfillment of the Great Commission and the mission of the Free Methodist Church requires larger, growing, and more effective local churches, as well as more and varied churches. Reaching unreached people is the reason for planting new churches. Every church must be willing and open to win all people for Christ and incorporate them into its membership. However, within every population group there are people who, due to geographic distance or linguistic or cultural differences, can be reached more easily by new churches than by existing ones. Creative strategies and multiple styles of ministry are needed.
¶6080: “In accordance with the spirit of paragraph 6040, as long as new churches live within the framework of the non-negotiable foundations (¶6040), they are free to be creative in the expression of the church.”
¶6860: “Since we consider evangelistic effectiveness to be our highest priority, we affirm that apostolic activity in the harvest fields will create many different forms and trajectories for new groups of disciples. In submission to Jesus’ teaching on the need for new wineskins for new wine, we choose to trust our apostolic leaders, allow innovation and organizational flexibility on the growing frontier of the Free Methodist Church, and avoid creating rigid institutional boundaries that limit the rapid expansion of the kingdom. We trust that, over time, godly disciple-makers and church planters will help many of the new disciples and groups to embrace the distinctive realities of the Free Methodist Church according to God’s direction.”
As the Community Church Planting Manual reminds us, and as Matthew 16:18 declares, the ultimate responsibility for establishing the church lies with the Lord Jesus. However, Luke 5:4-6 shows us that God, in His grace, chooses to use His disciples and the resources they have as instruments. In this spirit, Beta.Church seeks to be a faithful, contextualized, and hope-filled response to God’s mission in Chile, for this generation and those to come.
Conclusion: planting churches with wisdom and faith
“Whatever the platform, it must serve to give and receive love and practice mutual ministries for the life of the world God loves, instead of reinforcing consumerism. From worship to discipleship, community formation to missional outreach, connecting our gathered and scattered expressions, church forms in the digital age continue to explore the intersection of digital technology and theological foundations, aiming to reflect God both in online life and in the daily lives of people”. Fourth Lausanne Congress, 2024
What we are doing at Beta.Church is not an experiment or just another project, but an honest, missional, theologically robust, and culturally sensitive way of planting church today. It is a community that grows both as a network and as a body, that listens to the questions of new generations and responds faithfully to the eternal call of Jesus: “Now, as you go, make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). It is not just about being online, but about fulfilling the Great Commission to make disciples by embodying the Gospel in every possible space — digital and in-person — with wisdom, love, and depth.
We know that the digital church does not replace face-to-face gatherings, but it does prepare for them, complement them, and extend them. In a world where many do not attend a physical church but still seek spiritual guidance, our model responds with realism and hope. It is fertile ground where many can take their first step of faith, approach freely, and begin a path of transformation. That is why we believe the digital environment is part of the mission field God has entrusted to us. What is being sown here, with humility and vision, has the potential to bear abundant fruit for the glory of God and for the good of a generation that longs for truth, community, and hope. We are convinced that now more than ever we need a church that listens, accompanies, forms, and loves. And it is our responsibility to be there. And what is being sown here — with faithfulness, love, and vision — has the potential to bear abundant fruit for the glory of God.