Connected: The Methodist Church digital transformation podcast

In the fifth episode of Connected, Ben Hollebon marks a milestone: the publication of the programme's Master Discovery Report.In June, the Digital Transformation Programme published the full, single record of everything it heard during its discovery phase — every listening conversation, every survey and group, and research into what has and hasn't worked elsewhere. It went up on the Methodist website for anyone to read, and was sent directly to everyone who took part. This episode is a walk through what that listening surfaced.Ben starts with the scale of it — over 100 in-depth conversations, more than 300 survey voices, seventeen of the twenty-three districts reached at Chair level, and all twenty-three engaged in some way. Then he sets out the report's five headline findings, each one traced back to what real people actually said. People are the glue holding disconnected systems together. The church on our screens isn't always the church we hold on record — a gap of integration, not knowledge. Compliance is eating the time meant for mission — the weight and the fragmentation of it, never the duty of care underneath. The Connexion is already adapting, with paid lay "operations" roles appearing in five districts independently. And adoption, not technology, is the hard part.He's honest about what the report doesn't yet capture — younger voices, ordinary church members, Black-majority and diaspora congregations, and four districts not reached for a direct conversation — and about what happens now: the move from discovery into design, framed by five areas the evidence points toward, offered as possibilities to shape rather than promises. This episode is for anyone who wants to hear what the whole Church said when it was asked — and what the programme intends to do with it.

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.

In the third episode of Connected, Ben Hollebon takes a deliberate swerve from the promised tools-and-approaches episode to talk about something more fundamental: how the Digital Transformation Programme is being run.Four operating principles shape every decision the programme makes. The programme listens first, and keeps listening — fourteen Chair-level conversations across the Connexion to date, plus a wider mass-engagement layer that's now bringing voices in from districts the conversations haven't reached. It works in the open — drafts, thinking and decisions all out on the website as they happen, not when they're polished. It uses the tools that are available, including AI, in ways it can be honest about. And it's building everything to last beyond any one of us.Ben names two pastoral concerns about AI authenticity that District Chairs raised independently this week, and explains why those concerns belong inside the programme, not outside it. He sets out the wider Church conversation on AI ethics — across the AI Working Group, and into Conference. And he shares the question that one colleague put to him in five plain words — "we ship it, and… then what?" — and why it shapes the way the programme designs everything it builds.This episode is for anyone who wants to understand the working method behind the programme, and how to engage with it.