I want to start with a number that changed how I think about my own church. The average adult in this country now spends four and a half hours a day online — not at work, in their own time — and about three-quarters of that is on a phone. That's Ofcom's figure, published last December, and it's the most important statistic a church leader can hold in their head.
Because here's what it means in practice. The woman three streets away from your building, the one who'd never think of walking in on a Sunday, is on her phone this evening. So is her husband. So, very probably, is her mum — the over-65s in the UK average three hours and twenty minutes a day online. The assumption I hear most often from pastors is “our older neighbours aren't online.” The numbers say they are.
Ninety-three per cent of UK adults who are online use Facebook or Messenger; ninety per cent use WhatsApp. Facebook alone gets about forty-two minutes of the average person's day. Half of all the time this country spends online is spent on services owned by Meta and Google. That's not a trend to lament. It's a map. It tells you where the people you're praying for actually are, hour by hour.
For most of church history, reaching your neighbours meant going to where they were: the market, the school gate, the doorstep. Nothing about that instinct has changed. The place has. The front room is still the front room — but the door to it is a screen, and it's open for hours every day.
At Vision Church we took that seriously one Easter. Rather than printing another two thousand leaflets, we put one warm invitation on the Facebook and Instagram feeds of the people in the postcodes around our building. It was seen 10,458 times. 2,636 of our neighbours saw it; 132 responded and 101 clicked through to say they were coming; over two hundred adults and children walked through the door, and the Sunday after we needed more chairs for a full baptism service. We've done it every Easter since, and it has worked every single time.
Three small things. First, type your postcode into the free Know Your Community report and read who actually lives around your building — you'll be surprised. Second, look at your church's Facebook page through a stranger's eyes: does it look like a door that's open? Third, pick one event this year — one — that you'd love your neighbours to come to. Everything else follows from those three.
Figures: Ofcom, Online Nation 2025.
Want to talk any of this through for your own church? Twenty minutes with me, no strings.