Divine disruptions are happening on TikTok every day. Kelley Finch, Joseph Yoo and Sarah Tevis-Townes tell their stories of coming to TikTok and finding some beautiful relationships and community.
Rev. Kelley Finch is on TikTok as pastorkelley. She is a United Methodist pastor and planting a new church in Wilmington, North Carolina, called Mosaic.
Rev. Joseph Yoo is on TikTok as Joseph.Yoo. Joseph is a pastor in the Episcopal Church and has also planted a church called Mosaic… but this one is in Pearland, Texas.
Rev. Sarah TevisTownes, who you may have recently seen on the Kelly Clarkson show alongside Shawn Dromgoole, is on TikTok at disorganized.religion and is in parish ministry at Church of the Good Shepherd, a United Church of Christ congregation in Albequerque, New Mexico
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Episode Notes
Some TikTokers our guests recommended:
- The United Methodist Church (OK, Ryan recommended that one!)
- Rabbi Sandra
- Rev. Brandan Robertson
- Joshua Maria Garcia
- The Nerdy Priest
- Rabbi Seth
Resources
Interested in doing TikTok? Pastor Sarah did a series of instructional videos on YouTube for that.
Related episodes
- How gaming inspires faith
- Friendships and community for digital natives
- Making any moment a holy moment
- How spiritual practices disrupt our world
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This episode posted on December 7, 2022.
Episode transcript
Ryan Dunn:
This is The Compass Podcast, where we disrupt the everyday with glimpses of the divine. My name is Ryan Dunn. I'm a United Methodist minister and communicator. And part of my job right now at the close of 2022 is to direct the TikTok account for the United Methodist Church. If you're on the platform, check it out. It would be a big boost for me to see some of you on there. In running that account, I've encountered something surprising. The more theologically nerdy our videos get, the more views they tend to get. So for example, a funny video with silly jokes for International Joke Day, that gets hundreds of views. But a very cut and dry video of a pastor explaining the United Methodist view on the Bible, well, that gets thousands of views. A practice of rest and peace, hundreds of views, but what United Methodists believe about communion gets thousands of views. You get it.
That's curious to me because it runs counter to what many of us might assume about bringing religion into a public space like that. Being explicit with our beliefs and thoughts runs the risk of putting some people off, and maybe it actually does to some degree. But to a greater degree, it allows people an opportunity to quench their longing to be known and to know others. Being explicitly theologically nerdy makes it easy for people to get to know us, and that's a big part of what a social media platform like TikTok is about.
I've just recently made this connection, but many in the religious sphere made this connection a long time, and they've utilized that connection to build some beautiful communities and relationships through TikTok. That's right. There are pastors who have found TikTok to be a pulpit, insofar as TikTok allows them to begin conversations with thousands of people they might not otherwise have had any contact with. And these connections aren't just fleeting. Many of them are turning into relationships to the benefit of everyone involved. So I wanted to talk with some of these pastors. I chatted with three different pastoral TikTok influencers, Kelley Finch, AKA Pastor Kelley on TikTok, Joseph Yoo, AKA Joseph.Yoo, and Sarah TevisTownes, AKA, Disorganized.Religion. I had three general questions I asked each of them. One, what drew you to TikTok? Two, what kind of content do the users on TikTok really seem drawn towards? And three, what has TikTok, or how has TikTok impacted your parish ministry?
The following is most of what they told me in response, so let's see how the divine is disrupting in digital space by talking with the pastors of TikTok, starting with Kelley Finch, who as we mentioned, is on TikTok as Pastor Kelley. She is a United Methodist pastor and also is planting a new church in Wilmington, North Carolina called Mosaic. Pastor Kelley, what do you make of this TikTok app?
Kelley Finch:
It has changed, completely changed my ministry, but it's been a surprise, and it still almost every week is a surprise to me because I never was a social media person ever.
Ryan Dunn:
Okay. Did you dive into TikTok with the idea of being a pastorally presence? Or what drew you there in the first place?
Kelley Finch:
No. During the pandemic, my youth group, I was a family minister at Grace, and some of my youth group were like, "Pastor Kelley, get on TikTok and like my videos." And I was like, "Absolutely." It was a way for me to connect with them, and then some of the moms were on there, so I was connecting with people. And they're like, "Made a video, make a video." I made a couple. And then I made one where I was skateboarding in my clerical robe after church on Sunday. One of the kids videotaped it and it kind of blew up. And then I started to realize there was actually more than just dancing to TikTok. So I stumbled into it trying to like the videos of the kids in my church, and then I somehow changed my ministry and my life.
Ryan Dunn:
What was the next step from going from a pastor in a clerical alb to talking theology? Did you have a design in mind to make that transition?
Kelley Finch:
Being kind of new to understanding how ... I mean, I wasn't on Reddit. I mean, my youth group, I wasn't on any of that. I'm on Instagram and Facebook because I'm 48. So what I did is I just basically, after people liked and they started asking me questions about where I worked and what church it was, I started sharing my journey. I moved from the Baptist Church. I was an orphan from the Southern Baptist Church that was hurt by it, and found the Methodist Church was literally across the street when I left my ministry in Baptist Church and found a home. And so I just started sharing my experience about the difference between the Methodist Church and the Baptist Church, about why I was drawn there, about what I'd found there.
And people just kept listening and asking more questions. And so there was never a plan, I just was honest about what I believed and what I thought. And having that Baptist background the fundamentalist kind of influence in my early life, it resonated and it became something very powerful. And there still isn't a plan. I think being honest in who I am and sharing my deep belief and the beauties of our church, the traditions, and the hard parts and the good parts of our church, people are drawn to that honesty and fascinated. And it just kind of blew up from there.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah. So was there some reticence on your part in terms of just putting yourself out there? Were you like, "I don't know if I should share this part of my story"? Or are you open like that?
Kelley Finch:
I think I was a pastor's kid, so my story and especially coming from a Southern Baptist tradition, my story was the joke of sermons. My life was ... I mean, from my father and even through me, I have kind of been in a small town or city public kind of space I've grown up in. So I don't have a lot of ... I more so now have walked through with wonderful caregivers and therapists and stuff opening up more about my journey. But sharing my faith is what we do as pastors, so I basically was just sharing my faith in a very nerdy, church history, Bible way, but sharing my faith, which is what I do in the pulpit. I just did it in one minute segments on TikTok. And now I wasn't ever nervous.
Being a female pastor in the Southeast of the United States, and being surrounded by a lot of people who don't agree with that, I've always had people pushing back, so that didn't even bother ... I mean, it hurts but it didn't bother me, so I just went for it. And I figure sometimes we have to as pastors be the leaders, and be the honest people, and share. That's what we do.
Ryan Dunn:
But you have a pretty healthy following. Was there a point at which that kind of blew up? Was there a particular video that you put out there that people just discovered and were like, "Oh, I want to know more"?
Kelley Finch:
Yes, and we're going to get nerdy Methodist here for a minute.
Ryan Dunn:
Right on.
Kelley Finch:
Because it is literally my passion. In Sunday school because of the pandemic, we had a mixed generation class, which is difficult to teach. So I just started diving into the Wesleyan quadrilateral with them, and so I would have five year olds and 85 year olds, and we started looking at ... We'd read a Bible passage, and we started looking at the people in the passage. What did they eat? What did their house look like? What did their daily lives look like? And then how did what they did lead to the traditions we're doing now, like baptism and all these other traditions? And then what was that like for our experience?
And one Sunday, we were looking at Mary and what Mary, the mother of Jesus, what have eaten, and where she would've lived, and what she would've looked like, and the clothes she would've worn. And I did this video where I just took what we talked about in Sunday school, and in a minute I said, "Mary doesn't look like this." And I showed the traditional Catholic blue veiled that everyone sees. I said, "This is actually based on archeology, sociology, the mission in Talmud, this is what she would've looked like," and it went crazy. In fact, it has over 2.1 million views. You can see here. I mean, you can't see on the podcast, but I have tons of paintings and T-shirts and mods that people have copied, I think over 295 people have listened to my words and drawn Mary.
And it connected with people because Mary became a real person, not this ethereal kind of being. And so then we started the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. People would send me Bible stories. And either live or in videos, I would start with we'd literally read it from the NRSV or wherever they wanted to. And then we would break it down. We'd talk about what the people in the story were talking about. And then we'd talk about how our traditions of the church have pulled forward from that, some of the things we do across churches, or particularly in the Methodist Church have been pulled from that, and then how we apply it to our own experiences. There are so many people I think that know the word Wesleyan Quadrilateral. There are atheists and Muslims and stuff that follow me that are amazed by the fact that we do that. And that's what literally took me to 93,000 followers, is talking about how we as Methodists read the Bible, and then experiencing that together.
And then I go into, I literally read from the Book of Discipline, Book of Resolutions. Everything I share when they ask me about issues, I say, "This is how we decide as a Methodist body, and this is what we've decided." And something about that gives it more power than me just as a single person saying, "Hey, I think we shouldn't be antisemitic."
Ryan Dunn:
At any point did you feel this pull or temptation to try to jump on the latest trends in order to garner followers, like I need to figure out how to work it's corn into my latest video or something like that? Was there [inaudible 00:10:41] for you?
Kelley Finch:
Sometimes if something hits, if it really hits and resonates, I'll want to jump in and do it. And occasionally I will, but I try to think that through a little bit. I mean, I'm not a dancer. I'm not going to do the dances. Although, with some of my fellow clergy, I have, and some of the youth, I have. But I think the algorithms are very interesting on TikTok. And when people see me on their algorithm, I'm there for a reason, and they expect something I think more from me.
Ryan Dunn:
Are there specific questions that you seem to get over and over again? Or are there specific points of curiosity that people seem to express consistently?
Kelley Finch:
There are some questions that I say I will never stop answering. One, especially for our LGBTQ plus community ... I'm sorry, I'm going to change that because I'm learning through TikTok, our 2SLGBTQIA community, the acceptance and love of God. And even though our church is in this confusing place, it's been a beautiful way to show how we have a voice in the UMC and how we change the stuff that we feel is unfit or doesn't work with our theology. So that is something I will answer 1000 times over because I want to make sure people know they're loved. And then there are a lot of questions I didn't expect, like people really wanting to know about the finances of our church and how that works because they see the tax stuff, and they see these big mega churches, and how they're not opening their doors to our house-less community, and all this kind of stuff.
And so when people come with those questions, I try to find local churches, or national churches, or maybe even international churches that are doing that, and saying, "No, let me show you a version of what happens." And they want to see that it's not just me. And our UMC connection has been vital in that. They want to see that this is something we are experiencing around the world, and it's not just one pastor making money saying these things. This is something we work as a body, and those kind of questions still kind of catch me off guard because I feel like everyone should know about the UMC, but I always get new followers coming in asking the same like, "How does this work?"
Ryan Dunn:
So Mosaic is a new faith community. It's launching, officially launching, it sounds like it's kind of already underway, but officially launching January 8th of 2023. What is one thing that you're going to pull from TikTok into your kind of IRL faith community there?
Kelley Finch:
One of the parts of TikTok and the Methodist Church has been our church in society and our Book of Resolutions, and actually living outside of the walls of the church, and talking about how our church is moving more and more how we're growing and sanctifying ourselves and moving more and more to being grace in action. And so our local body here, they are ... The same thing I do on TikTok, we explain the Book of Worship and how worship works. And then we take the parts that are important and key, a lot of them want to know what Charles and John Wesley said about things, and we'll go back and we'll look at that, here even in my local level. And then we say, "Okay, this is what we want to keep. But how about if we change this?"
For instance, our prayers of the people, that time after our sermon, where we normally talk about the individual church concerns, because we are online and in person, and because the people that are forming our group didn't really want the people in the church to be the focus. They wanted the work and the world to be the focus. That's going to be more of a social justice moment where I'm going to preach, but we're going to have different people from the community come up and either share their walk with Christ, or share how we can walk in the world. And so what we did on TikTok, the deconstructing, which that word is overused now, and reconstructing, has become what our church is. We are really taking the fundamentals of Methodist life and putting them into action in our church in a way that I personally am having to break away from a lot of norms that I think are traditions of our church, but they're just what churches in the South do, or churches in the North do, so it has really changed.
One of the best things that has changed if you talk to the people that I preach to is that my sermons are a lot shorter. When you learn to do something in a minute to three minutes on TikTok, and then you preach for 20 minutes, you're like, "I've been talking forever." So there's some practical applications. My sermons, if I go more than 12 or 13 minutes, I'm like, "That's too much." And the actual way our church operates is from worship, to service, to Bible studies.
Ryan Dunn:
Anything else you want to add?
Kelley Finch:
I think just being authentic is very important. We, a lot of times as pastors, want to present this perfect image. And there's filters, there's all these things. But the days that I get on there and I just do something off the cuff, when my hair's not done, and I don't have the perfect filter, and I just share something from my heart, have been the ones that have gone as viral. And in between sharing information, sharing love, love and grace. I don't talk back to people who hate me. I delete and block. I speak to those whose ears are open. And there can be an ugly side, but there can be such a beautiful side, such a communal side, that if you talk to people with love and grace, and you accept that love and grace, and you stay in that place instead of get caught up in the ugly side of it, it's been beautiful.
It has grown me spiritually. It has grown me into a deeper connection with the Methodist Church, with other progressive Christians, and our Jewish siblings, and our Muslim siblings. It's just grown me. But you need to be honest and you need to be authentic. And I would love to have thousands of us on TikTok and across social media sharing that message because I think that's what makes Heaven on Earth.
Ryan Dunn:
Boom. All right. Let's get more perspectives. Here's Joseph Yoo, who is on TikTok as Joseph.Yoo. Joseph is a pastor in the Episcopal Church and has also planted a church called Mosaic, but this one is in Houston, Texas. Joseph, let's actually start with the drip. You've got your clergy collar on right now. Do you find it important to kind of present the clerical drip within TikTok?
Joseph Yoo:
Not necessarily. I just wear it to work. And when I decide to make a video, I just am doing it with whatever I have on. I don't go and then change and then make a video of it. A lot of times I'll be wearing Houston Dynamos gear because I have a lot of that, so it's not intentional in the sense that for TikToks. It's intentional that I wear it in my neighborhood where my church is at. And I just end up making videos with it on, or maybe a lot of my videos are at coffee shops, outside away from the music, so that I can make the videos. So I'm just recording with what I have on at that moment.
Ryan Dunn:
So when it comes to digital content for me, I work from a calendar, and I forecast it all out. Here's where we're going to be by the end of the week. And it sounds like when it comes to at least for TikTok for you, you're just going spur of the moment, like something hits you, maybe Holy Spirit says, "Pastor Joe, it's time to get on TikTok." Is that kind of what it's like for you?
Joseph Yoo:
I mean, I used to in the very beginning have ... I made 10 videos and saved them, set aside a day, make all these videos, and then post them up on every other day, two or three times a week and whatnot. And then it just got to become a chore. And part of that, I talked about this in a sermon once, after a while when a video goes semi viral and your phone just gets all these notifications, so much that you have to turn it off, there's this dopamine hit that comes with it, and you just want more and more and more of it. Right? So then the first-
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah, there's a lot of power in that publish button.
Joseph Yoo:
It is.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah, absolutely.
Joseph Yoo:
For the first three or four months, when a video hit and resonated with people, and I was getting the views and interaction stuff, the desire to do something similar so that I get that same attention again and the same reaction, and the same interaction and views and whatnot, and then what happens eventually is that you start chasing after the algorithm. And you no longer create content, you're no longer a creator, but you're an algorithm chaser. And then after four months of doing this, I realized I'm a 40 year old man on an app that's not geared to my age people. Let's just do what I want, what I like, and on the schedule that I like, and if it resonates with people, great. If it doesn't, then I made something that I wanted, I got something off my chest that I wanted to say. So now I think this is a good idea. Let's make it right now. I have 10 minutes, and let's hope I get it done in 10 minutes. And then that's been my MO for the past three or four months.
Ryan Dunn:
But you talked about a little bit out of your zone as a 40 year old guy. Sorry, don't want to age you up there prematurely. What drew you into TikTok in the beginning?
Joseph Yoo:
A lot of my friends were sending me videos of the funny dog videos, or comedic bits, or whatnot. And I was like, "All right. Let's see this." And I made the fatal mistake of downloading the app. And once I was on, it's addicting. You can't stop. So my friends starting sending me all these videos and I just started watching them, and I just stayed on.
Ryan Dunn:
Did you have it in mind when you first started making your own videos to be somewhat of a pastorally presence? Because your channel is very ... I mean, you're representative about who you are as a minister.
Joseph Yoo:
Yeah. I never intended to make anything. I just was going to be a lurker on this app. And then all these Christian content started coming my way, both from what we would say progressive Christians and pastors, and what we would call conservative pastors and Christian leaders. And I was like, "If Christians go on this, maybe I can do something and offer my perspectives on stuff." So yeah, I never intended to make videos, but when I did, there's nothing else I can really talk about. Being a pastor has been such ingrained me, it's all I can talk about, so I was like, "Well, might as well talk about something that I'm somewhat capable of being confident of knowing what I do and what I say."
Ryan Dunn:
So then, now that you've been at this for quite a while and you've actually grown quite a following, and some of your videos have taken off in a viral sense, has it impacted your ministry?
Joseph Yoo:
Yes and no. It has impacted my ministry in the digital platform, like on TikTok. People, I've exchanged a couple of emails, lots more than a couple of emails with people who are deconstructing, who have questions, people who are considering ordination and whatnot. But on the actual physical ministry where I'm generous enough to get paid to do, there has been little to no effect. I may have had ... I had two people who've come and stayed at my church because they saw me online. And then I had a handful of visitors who were in town or saw something and was nearby, so they came to visit, but haven't stuck. So it hasn't really translated anything into the physical Sunday morning here in Houston type of ministry.
But I do feel like I've made some connections and relationship with people who I may never meet in person. There's the family in San Diego that saw me through TikTok and we've been in touch ever since, and checking in on each other and whatnot. So it's a both yes and no answer to that.
Ryan Dunn:
What kind of content do you see taking off for you on TikTok? As you are getting questions, do they seem to hit on certain areas? Are there certain videos that you put up that you know are going to score better in the algorithm? [inaudible 00:24:08].
Joseph Yoo:
Yeah, unfortunately it's when I'm hyperly critical of the church. Those contents seem to resonate with the people I guess who follow me on TikTok, so maybe that's why. And I try not to be overly critical, but ... How do I say this? I want to say the Augustine quote, where he says, "The church is a whore, but she's also my mother."
Ryan Dunn:
Well, there, you said it.
Joseph Yoo:
Edit it out, edit it out. I'm sorry. But I love the church, but I also know what we should and can be, and how even my church and myself have fallen short of that, of what we should aspire to be. And so I like to ... So being critical of a church, and then offering a different insight of scripture is the two things that seem to really get me, really please the lower case g, god of algorithm.
Ryan Dunn:
Got you. Okay. In a different way, as you're being the worker on TikTok, does that inspire you in ministry in any way? Are you finding some questions or figuring out ways that people are presenting questions of faith that helps you put together a sermon, or put together other TikTok stuff?
Joseph Yoo:
Yeah. I've been connecting with a lot of deconstructing people. And some of the questions that they ask, I have either forgotten about it since my deconstruction happened in seminary, which was early 2000 to mid 2000. Or I just never thought of it that way. So having that fresh insight of questions, I feel like it helps me stay grounded through trying to be relevant to the people I can actually connect with in person, so people who have all these questions really help me see things in a different way. And I don't think I would've gotten that if I didn't have the connections that I made on TikTok.
Ryan Dunn:
Sarah TevisTownes, who you may have recently seen on The Kelly Clarkson show alongside Shawn Dromgoole, she TikToks at Disorganized.Religion, and is in parish ministry at Church of the Good Shepherd, which is a United Church of Christ congregation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Pastor Sarah, what drew you to TikTok?
Sarah TevisTownes:
Well, I joined TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic at the advice of my church administrator. And I should say church administrators are underrated and underappreciated, and we should all celebrate them. Erica at the church is my biggest supporter and cheerleader and protector. She was doing some videos on TikTok and said, "You should do some for the church, teach some things about the Bible. This is a great platform." And I said, "That sounds like a terrible idea." But I kept watching, and so around Easter time, I made my first video. And it got a surprising number of views. I mean, my first TikTok, it probably got 500 views, which for a new person is a ton. And it took me hours and hours to record because I recorded and re-recorded. And I was really uptight about it. But the other thing is that it got me engaged with people during a time when it was really hard to be engaged with other people.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah. Well, for you, once you started TikToking, what was the first video that really kind of took off, not just 500 views, but to the point that you were like, "Oh, my gosh, I can't believe how far this is reaching"?
Sarah TevisTownes:
So my early viral videos were actually about service dogs. I have a disability. I have a seizure disorder. And I have a service dog, and it drives me nuts that people bring fake service dogs into stores and say they're service dogs, but then they bark and they come after me or my dog. And so the first video I got that had over a million views was how to spot a fake service dog. I also had a video go viral that was, again, not about progressive Christianity, per se. It was about what to wear to a protest. And this is when the Black Lives Matter movement was taking off. It was after the killing of George Floyd. And I'm talking about as a white woman, dressing really nice to a protest, I don't know. It was sort of tongue in cheek, but that you can be part of that group of folks that protects the people who are most vulnerable at protests.
Ryan Dunn:
So these days, you're getting a lot of traction out of some deep theological type material. I mean, you present it in a somewhat whimsical kind of way, but it's deep. What drew you into addressing those deep theological topics on TikTok?
Sarah TevisTownes:
It was the audience, really. Early on, I was doing this service dog content. Maybe one in 10 videos I would touch on some sort of theological topic. And people jumped onto that and said, "I have so many questions." And so it was the audience who begged for that content and said, "I want to know more." A lot of people had never met a female pastor before, which surprised me. A lot of folks had never met a queer friendly pastor before. And so they were just curious, they were fascinated. They wanted to know more, and so that's why I dove into that. Most of my content now is answering questions that fans have asked.
For example, I don't talk a lot in my church about angels and demons. I haven't talked about Lucifer in my church possibly ever. Or the Angel Gabriel, we don't usually spend a ton of time talking about the Book of Enoch. It's not even in our canon. It's epochal. But the TikTok audience is fascinated by that and they wanted to know more. The topic of homosexuality in the Bible of course is still a big one. In my church, that was settled a really long time ago. It's not something we discuss all the time. People don't say, "Well, how can you reconcile the Bible and homosexual relationships?" But the TikTok audience, there are folks who've never heard that information. Yeah, it was surprising.
Ryan Dunn:
Are there questions that you're starting to see over and over again?
Sarah TevisTownes:
What's fascinating is that the audience has come with me. I feel like the content I'm doing now is different than the content I was doing two years ago because the audience is more educated. And it's not just my content. Of course, there are 250 progressive clergy doing content alongside me, and so we're educating the TikTok audience. So we're able to do different and more, I don't know how to say complex, but we're doing different content than we were two years ago. One of my characters is really good evidence of that. I have this Karen character, which I have mixed feelings about. She's blonde, she's very judgemental. She started out being really judgemental of progressive Christians in particular. But the more time she spends with me ... Karen, by the way, for those of you who don't know, I play Karen. I put on a blonde wig and put on this persona.
Ryan Dunn:
If you look deeply, you can tell. It'll be obvious.
Sarah TevisTownes:
It's pretty obvious it's me, and it is a part of me. It's a part of who I grew up, who I was socialized to be. But Karen has had this incredible character arc. And that's part of why people stay tuned into my channel is they want to see Karen's growth, and they're growing alongside her.
Ryan Dunn:
Where did Karen come out of?
Sarah TevisTownes:
So Karen is a meme that is common. Karen was a shortcut. And I say I have mixed feelings about it because I do feel like now at this point, people are using the Karen meme as a way to attack women specifically. And so as a feminist, I have really mixed feelings about having a Karen character. I also have four members of my church named Karen.
Ryan Dunn:
Who are probably nothing like the TikTok Karen. Right?
Sarah TevisTownes:
Right. But TikTok Karen is a shortcut because Karen became a name for women who were explicitly racist, judgemental, wanted to talk to the manager about things that were really not issues, like they wrote her name in the wrong place on the Starbucks cup kind of thing, or there was a man picking up trash in her neighborhood and she thought he was suspicious. And the other thing is, it was a way for me to process some of the difficult and ugly questions that I got from people in my real life, not my church members necessarily. I think that would be a boundary violation if a church member said something really offensive and then I put it directly in a TikTok and made fun of them.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah, right.
Sarah TevisTownes:
I wouldn't do that. But hearing somebody outside the church saying, "Do you really need a rainbow flag on your church building?" Well, that's the kind of question that Karen was able to ask and that I'm able to respond to. And it inadvertently empowers people to have then a response because that's a question a lot of people ask. Well, I don't know if we want to be reconciling, or open and affirming. I don't want us to be the gay church in town. All right. Well, how do you respond to that as a Christian, as a loving person, as a church person? And so it gave me an opportunity in one minute, all my videos are a minute or less, to have Karen get it, so it was also satisfying because in my videos, Karen always comes around. Right?
So not everyone in society if I said, "No, we need a rainbow flag on the church building," because the assumption is that all Christians are bigoted, because historically we've been awful to LGBTQ plus people, among other populations. And so no one is going to trust us. It's like a surfer who's been bit by a shark. If a shark says to them, "Well, I'm one of the good sharks," the surfer's going to be like, "I'm still going to be cautious around you."
Ryan Dunn:
People are friends, not food. Yeah.
Sarah TevisTownes:
Right, people are friends, not food. The surfer's still going to be cautious. Well, a lot of people are cautious around Christians because they've been hurt by Christians. And so if we're not over the top, undeniably affirming of marginalized groups, they're not going to feel safe here. And so by the end of that video, and that's one of the videos that did really well, Karen was able to, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense." Now does everyone who says things like that get it within a minute? Probably not. But yeah, it's also helped me process through some of the difficult things I hear people say that are hurtful.
Ryan Dunn:
But it sounds like you've drawn a healthy line between, I guess your pastoral ministry, your parish ministry, and you've been at Church of the Good Shepherd in Albuquerque, New Mexico for quite a while. Correct?
Sarah TevisTownes:
Yes.
Ryan Dunn:
Without bringing that over into TikTok and putting people on blast there, or using it as a way to kind of, I don't know, let out your frustration from the parish ministry. But are there ways that TikTok has impacted your parish ministry?
Sarah TevisTownes:
100%.
Ryan Dunn:
Yeah. Okay. How so?
Sarah TevisTownes:
First of all, my preaching is much better. I'm more courageous. I had a fear of all the vulnerability that comes with being a public figure on TikTok. And what I learned is that when I do put myself out there, the positive feedback is so much greater than the one or two negative comments. And what TikTok has taught me is that being vulnerable, being real, connects with people. The other thing is when I go live once a week, I go live for about an hour once a week and have theological conversations with people around the world of different faiths, and they ask me super tough questions that keep me on my toes.
And so I'm more engaged with scripture. I'm more engaged with my faith. My more connected because I'm always talking about my faith with people who are outside the church, not just people inside the church. Certainly, I've gotten better at improvisation in the church. And I also find that my church members are more connected, and I'm still working on this, but our church members are more connected with younger generations. It's also changed our membership. We have people joining who are TikTok fans, and that is-
Ryan Dunn:
You do?
Sarah TevisTownes:
We do. So the last time we had new members join, half came from TikTok, which is remarkable because I'm in a relatively small ... Yeah, I'm not in Houston. I'm in Albuquerque, so the fact that we have TikTok fans that live in the city is pretty exciting, and then the fact that they start coming to church. But I've also started using TikTok videos in church, and not just mine, but colleagues of mine. We have more technology in the church in general, but I'm able to share this incredible wisdom in a fun and offbeat kind of way that my church really likes. It's given me some just new ways of connecting.
One of the things I'm trying is to do collaborations with church members, so that ... And I have had a couple church members come to live sessions with me on TikTok, so that TikTok fans get to talk to actual church members. It's tricky because of the pacing. My church members tend to talk a lot more slowly and tell super long stories, and TikTok goes really fast. But it's been valuable both to my membership and to the TikTok audience to be like, "Oh, it's not just pastor Sarah who feels this way. There's an 85 year old woman who has my back, who loves me, who believes in a loving God who cares about justice." That has a big impact, so I'm hoping to do more collaborations with my church members going forward.
Ryan Dunn:
Who are some people on TikTok, some creators that inspire you?
Sarah TevisTownes:
There are so many. So I love, let's see, Rabbi Seth is the first one who comes to mind, just because I'm learning a lot about Judaism from him. Rabbi Sandra is another. Nerdy Priest is one of my favorites. Nerdy Priest is Anglican, and so I also learn a lot from them. I like Reverend Brandon a lot. It's fun because we discovered Reverend Brandon when he had 12 followers, and gotten into the community, and now he's blown up. Ben Shapiro just posted a video against him, and so he's doing great work. What I like is that all of these people are doing their own thing. It's very authentically them. There's not a formula for success. I mean, we could talk more about the formula for success. I have a whole YouTube series about how to be successful on TikTok as a clergy person.
The people who inspire me are the folks who are authentic, who are just speaking truth, and then also educating us about something, but also not taking themselves too seriously. That's one of the things I like about TikTok versus Instagram, for example. It's not all shiny and beautiful. It's very real, and that appeals to people. Joshua Maria Garcia, my page is also populated by community organizers and other folks doing really interesting things.
Ryan Dunn:
Tell me what Karen is going to learn next.
Sarah TevisTownes:
Karen still has a lot to learn, but one of the-
Ryan Dunn:
Don't we all?
Sarah TevisTownes:
We do, because now Karen, she's not departed from her judgemental nature. She's just judging conservative fundamentalists instead. And that's not particularly ... That's not the direction that maybe Jesus would want us to go. We're working on it. We're working on it. Calling out bad behavior or toxic behavior, yes. Saying that people are evil, not great. The thing that I'm shifting now is that Karen in some of my videos is the hero. She's the one who teaches me as the pastor something. So this does a couple of things, first of all, the pastor's not always the good guy, which empowers church members and all the people on TikTok because to embody this different message, which is it's okay to question clergy. Historically, clergy were the ones who were always right. And part of the problem historically with the church has been that there hasn't been a lot of accountability for the clergy.
And so by doing these videos, I'm also modeling being a clergy person that receives feedback from someone who is occasionally difficult to listen to, who doesn't always say things in the kindest manner, and recognizing that there's some truth in what she's saying. And so that's good for me in my parish ministry because I do have people offer feedback, sometimes in ways that are not the kindest, so I practice. But also, just remembering that the pastor is not the center, that people are able to read the scripture, are able to be in community, are able to listen to the Holy Spirit and discover the good news for themselves. And sometimes they have insights, in fact, oftentimes, they have insights that the pastor hasn't thought about. So Karen's learning to use her voice in a more healthy way, maybe.
Ryan Dunn:
All right. Divine disruptions in digital space, kind of like this podcast. Am I right? Thanks for taking this walk with us. The Compass Podcast is brought to you by United Methodist Communications. If Compass is meaningful for you, then check out another episode. If you like this one, then How Gaming Inspires Spiritual Connection from September of 2021 might be up your alley as well, or Friendships in Community for Digital Natives from March of 2021 might be a good one too. While you're listening, leave a rating and/or review. Compass comes out every other Wednesday, unless we're interrupted by a holiday, in which case, we'll hit your feed the following week. But we'll be back online in two weeks time, in this case, talking about the myths we tend to believe of Christmas. Shout at you then. Peace.
