The church is navigating a crisis of presence. Participation in institutional religion is declining across every major demographic. Still, seeking remains wide-spread. People have persistent questions and desires about meaning, belonging, justice, and how to live. They are simply much more likely to bring these questions online than into traditional church spaces. In general, trust in the church itself is collapsing.

For a specific and growing population, that collapse is personal. People wounded by exclusionary religion are not simply “unchurched.” They include LGBTQ+ people told their identities are incompatible with faith, those whose churches failed to reckon with racism and anti-Blackness, and those who grew up where doubt or difference were penalized. They are church-wounded. They carry real spiritual hunger alongside real spiritual injury, and they are looking for something categorically different.

Many of them are already online, in communities that have become genuine spaces of meaning-making and mutual care. The church has been slow to meet people there, and slower still to do so with the theological depth and justice orientation this population specifically needs. Ministries most capable of reaching these people are chronically under-resourced, and ordinary congregations lack models to learn from. The result is a mission field that is vast and largely unworked.

The Solution

The classic cooperative parish model begins with a countercultural conviction: our mission is larger than any single congregation, and the church is strongest when it operates as a connected ecosystem, sharing infrastructure, staffing, and resources across distinct communities.

Thanks to the Desert South West Conference of the United Methodist Church, a brand new initiative is emerging: The Digital Cooperative Parish. This first of its kind collaboration extends that traditional model into the most active mission field of our time, where people wounded by exclusionary religion seek communities of belonging, and dream of a faith that liberates. The ministries in this cooperative are already built by and for those people. By collaborating together, they can create an even greater reach.

The Digital Cooperative Parish brings together three ministries: Zao Church Collective, The Clearing, and Checkpoint Church. The three ministries also represent three distinct ecclesiological responses to the same crisis:

Zao is re-institutional: it exists for people who want church badly enough to have kept looking, who are hungry for liturgy, discipleship, and communal belonging, but whose full selves have never been safe inside existing institutions. Zao’s harbor network of digitally-connected house gatherings is church re-imagined.

The Clearing is post-institutional: it exists for people who are done looking, who have left and are not coming back, but who remain spiritually serious and need formation, contemplation, and community that makes no demands of institutional belonging.

Checkpoint is native digital: it exists for people who never oriented toward physical congregation in the first place, whose community, identity, and spiritual curiosity are already entirely at home in digital space.

Meet the Three Ministries!

1. Zao Church Collective

Zao Church Collective was born out of a longing from its planter, Rev. Jonah P Overton. As a queer, trans/nonbinary, millenial, progressive activist with cultural ties to charismatic worship, evangelical campus ministries, and multiracial community, they just wanted a place to worship that both felt like home and could hold and honor every part of them.

It turned out they weren’t as alone as they felt, and that there is no shortage of people who are spiritually hungry, theologically serious, often deeply formed by faith and faith communities, but who have experienced their fullest selves to be unacceptable or unwelcome in church. They are some combination of queer, trans, activist, multiracial, young, and unwilling to perform a lesser version of themselves. They want church, badly. Most have just come to believe that the church doesn’t want them.

Zao Church Collective was born in a living room in Milwaukee, WI: a house church rooted in liberation theology, queer leadership, communal discipleship, and a Wesleyan conviction regarding the interconnection of faith and justice. Planted by Rev. Jonah Overton and co-led by Dr. Cameron Overton, Zao spent nearly a decade building community with and for people the institutional church has largely failed or abandoned, and grew to a 200-person local community in a historic UMC building.

As Zao has grown, the traditional parish model has become limiting, and even dangerous, for such a nontraditional community. Zao is facing two constraints: 1) the limits of geography, and 2) the current threats to the safety and wellbeing of its core vulnerable population. Zao’s leadership has discerned an ambitious expansion that prioritizes protecting the vulnerable in an increasingly hostile environment, grows its reach beyond its current geographic limits, and develops a network of spiritual and material connection and care.

At the center of Zao’s new structure is its Digital Sanctuary, a persistent online community where people anywhere can enter into Zao’s life, build rhythms of spiritual practice, and connect with others near or far. That digital infrastructure also serves as the connective tissue for a distributed network of house gatherings called Harbors: small, relational communities gathering for worship, mutual care, and justice work across the country. Each Harbor roots locally while remaining a part of the larger community, built on shared identity, leadership, liturgy, discipleship, and teaching.

What began as one planter’s longing for a place to worship as their whole self has become a new form of church, growing like wild mustard, where that authenticity, vulnerability, and movement toward liberation is valued and cultivated.

Zao is excited to bring to the cooperative:

• Years of experimental justice-rooted ministry

• Expertise in relational and hybrid congregational models

• Administrative and operational infrastructure expertise

• Practical implementation of liberative faith-based justice values

• Expertise in building and innovating church experience from the margins of current church demographics (which can be seen by Zao’s demographics and leadership: majority millennial and Gen z, LGBTQ, and multi-racial)

2. The Clearing

There Is a Spiritual Exile Happening

Thousands of people — disproportionately Black, Brown, and queer — have left or been pushed out of institutional religious communities. They have not, however, left the spiritual life. Many remain deeply formed by religious tradition, theologically sophisticated, and hungry for community. What they have lost is a container that can hold their full complexity, their honest questions, and their ongoing formation without requiring them to perform certainty they do not have, or accept frameworks that have caused them harm.

The cultural, psychological, and communal consequences of this exile are significant. People navigating post-institutional faith often experience isolation, grief, and a loss of the practices and rhythms that once structured their lives. At the same time, they carry gifts — deep insights, hard-won wisdom, a hunger for authentic community — that have no adequate home.

The Clearing was founded by Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms in response to this gap: to create a digital-forward spiritual community that holds people in post-Christian transition, provides structured formation, and galvanizes them — together — toward healing and toward good in the world.

How The Clearing Gathers

The Clearing meets 2x monthly online (via Discord/Circle) and supplements digital connection with in-person programming across multiple cities. Each gathering follows a formation arc:

• Check-In — informal conversation and grounding

• Center Down — short ritual to focus attention (breath, music, body)

• Content — live sermon, teaching, or guest-led practice

• Conversation — small group reflection and sharing

• Contemplation — guided meditation, journaling, or communal practice

Between in person gatherings, the online community sustains ongoing conversation, resource sharing, prayer requests, and connection—functioning as the digital hush harbor the ministry is designed to be.

The Clearing is excited to bring to the cooperative:

• Deep expertise in womanist theology, Black mystical traditions, and contemplative formation for people navigating faith beyond or after institutional Christianity.

• A proven public teaching and storytelling platform with an established audience of seekers, practitioners, and theological innovators.

• Original theological frameworks—resurrection technology, hush harbor praxis, the R.E.S.T. Mixtape, Soulful Leadership Theory—that can be adapted into shared discipleship curriculum and formation resources across the cooperative.

• Cultural credibility and relational trust with communities that the broader church has historically struggled to reach: post-church seekers, Black mystics, people healing from religious harm, and those building spiritual practice outside institutional containers.

• A community design model rooted in the hush harbor tradition—offering the cooperative a lived example of how digital sacred space can be built with theological depth, cultural integrity, and genuine pastoral care.

3. Checkpoint Church

Checkpoint Church, led by Rev. Nathan Webb, is a digital-first United Methodist congregation serving nerds, geeks, gamers, and digital natives. It exists to reach people who are often spiritually curious but disconnected from traditional congregational life, especially those whose identity, relationships, and deepest questions are already being formed in digital spaces. Checkpoint offers real congregational life through worship, discipleship, prayer, theological reflection, pastoral presence, and ongoing relational community online. It is not a supplement to “real” church elsewhere, but a functioning congregation built for people whose lives are already deeply shaped by digital culture.

Checkpoint has developed a significant public-facing ministry presence through digital media, especially on YouTube and related platforms. This public reach functions as both proclamation and invitation, creating accessible entry points for spiritually curious people who may never enter a traditional church setting.

Some current online data for Checkpoint Church:

• Current YouTube subscribers: 176,000

• Total views in the past 12 months: 681,243 views

• Average monthly unique viewers: 38,307 unique viewers

• Growth in subscribers over the last year: 78,279 new subscribers

Checkpoint’s public-facing reach is connected to ongoing relational life, particularly through its digital community infrastructure. The ministry is not built around one-way content alone, but around recurring participation, discussion, prayer, pastoral connection, and community rhythms.

Checkpoint offers multiple pathways for spiritual growth and deeper engagement, including worship, discussion-based discipleship, thematic events, and guided communal experiences. These offerings help move people from passive consumption into meaningful participation and formation.Checkpoint is not simply attracting attention online. It is cultivating recurring engagement, relational community, spiritual formation, leadership participation, and growing commitment over time.

Checkpoint is expertly positioned to bring to the cooperative:

• a functioning digital-first congregational model

• a live ministry environment in which shared initiatives can be piloted, evaluated, and refined

• expertise in digital community formation, public-facing theology, and online relational ministry

• measurable ministry data related to public reach, recurring participation, newcomer retention, discipleship content, and volunteer leadership

• thought leadership and practical guidance around faithful AI use in ministry, including policy development, ethical standards, and implementation support for churches

• year-to-year proof that shared cooperative systems can strengthen ministry practice in a real congregational setting

• practical learning that can help the cooperative generate replicable models, training insights, and ministry resources for other United Methodist ministries and churches

What is Next?

The Digital Cooperative Parish is excited to dream with others about the liberative future of digital ministry. There are ways YOU can get involved.

• Subscribe to our Substack and follow us all on social media platforms to continue to see the new developments of this initiative. We will have monthly offerings from the cooperative.

Zao Church Collective

Zao's Linktree

Dr. Cameron Overton's Linktree

The Clearing

Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms' Linktree

Checkpoint Church

Checkpoint Church's Linktree

Pastor Nate's Linktree

The Digital Cooperative Parish

Digital Cooperative Parish's Linktree

• Join a cohort!

  • Are you interested in getting involved with digital forward ministries and desire to be trained in the best practices by current practitioners? Join us here.

• Tell your friends

  • Does this excite you? It might excite someone else.

• Reach out

  • Contact us at thedigitalcooperativeparish@gmail.com

More to come, so stay tuned as we build faith community that is interconnected, deeply rooted, and moving everywhere!