Three months in to the Digital Transformation Programme
What I'm hearing, and what I'd like to ask you
05 May 2026
"Folks are drowning. They're drowning because there's so much bureaucracy that the individual church has to shoulder. We need to toss them a lifeline."
Someone I spoke to recently put it like that, about fifteen minutes into a conversation about the work of the Digital Transformation Programme. I haven't been able to put the line down.
I've heard a version of that sentence in nearly every conversation I've had since I took up this role at the start of March. Different words, different parts of the country, different roles - administrators, ministers, stewards, trustees, volunteers - but the same picture. The amount of paperwork, compliance, reporting, training tracking, safeguarding records, governance documentation that sits on the shoulders of local churches has grown steadily. The tools we have to manage it haven't kept up.
The Digital Transformation Programme is the Connexion's response to that. The Connexional Council has backed it because, plainly, the administrative weight on the people who run our churches has become a real obstacle to ministry and mission. The hope is straightforward. Free people up. Less time on the parts of the job that drain the joy out of it. More time for the things they came into ministry, or volunteering, or church life to do.
I've spent the first three months of this role mostly listening. Long, unhurried conversations - usually an hour, sometimes longer - with district chairs, superintendents, circuit administrators, local-church members and many others. Right now nineteen of the twenty-three districts have been part of the conversation at one level or another. Some of those have been with the people at the top of the diary. Others - and this is the part I've found most useful - have been with the people who actually keep the work moving on a typical morning.
What I'm hearing, again and again, is not a story about technology. It's a story about people.
Here's one of them. Someone closely involved in property and governance work across their district said to me:
"If you have an expensive computer, but you plug in a cheap keyboard, your experience of the whole thing is rubbish, because the keyboard is what you actually touch."
They were talking about the way Methodist volunteers and trustees experience certain systems - but the principle reaches a long way past any one tool. We are an organisation that runs on the goodwill of dedicated pe. Their experience of the systems we ask them to use is their experience of being part of the Methodist Church. If we get that wrong, we are not just creating an inconvenience. We are quietly making it harder for them to keep going.
Another conversation, this time with someone who chairs a district. They told me about a member of one of their churches - articulate, deeply involved, contributing for years - who had simply stopped being able to read pages on our website, because the assistive technology they relied on had stopped working with it. They didn't complain. They didn't write to anyone. They just stopped using it.
That's the kind of thing the Digital Transformation Programme exists to notice and to fix.
What I want to do over the coming year - and what I'm asking for help with now - is to widen this listening out.
The first three months have surfaced a remarkably consistent picture, but it's still mostly a picture from the people I've been able to get on a video call. There are voices I haven't heard yet. Voices that don't usually get a meeting in the diary. Voices from the parts of the Connexion that don't get asked about technology because we tend to assume technology isn't their thing.
Those are exactly the voices that ought to be shaping this work. Not consulting on it after the fact - shaping it.
So I'm going to ask, directly.
What is the one thing about Methodist life that a better digital tool could make easier - for you, your church, or someone you know? Tell us in a sentence, a paragraph, or as much as you'd like.
You can answer that one question through our new survey. There is no length limit. There is no right or wrong answer. We will read everything that comes in. At the end of every month, we will publish a short post on the Digital Transformation news and updates page that simply says - here is what we heard. We will keep doing that for as long as you keep telling us things.
If we cannot keep that loop going, we close the channel. Asking and not replying is worse than not asking at all.
I'd rather not get to that point. So please - if any of this resonates, take a minute and tell us. Even a single sentence is a help. Especially a single sentence, in fact, from somebody who would not otherwise have been asked.
Ben Hollebon
Director of Digital and Transformation