Building a Christian Community Beyond Social Media: Lessons from The Story Haven
This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 98. You can listen in here!
Why We Wanted to Talk About Community, Not Just Audience
We kicked off season eight with a conversation we’d been looking forward to for a long time. Our guest, Jessica DeYoung, is an author, speaker, podcast host, retreat leader, and the creator of The Story Haven — a free, invite-only Christian community built for writers and storytellers who want connection without the noise of social media. If you’ve ever felt like leaving social media meant giving up on community altogether, this conversation is for you.
Jessica’s story starts, like so many of ours do, with a lot of hats. She’s a wife, a mom of three teens and a preteen, and she and her husband have spent almost five years traveling full-time in a motorhome. When they’re not working, they’re on the water somewhere, taking Jesus with them wherever they go. That sense of slowing down and paying attention shows up everywhere in how she talks about building community, too.
A Love-Hate Relationship With the Algorithm
We always ask our guests about their current relationship with social media, and Jessica didn’t hesitate. She still uses it, she told us, but it serves a different purpose now than it once did. It helps her find new people and bring them together, she admits, but she’s also watched the censorship, the algorithm shifts, and the constant chase for visibility wear her down. “I’m tired of fighting the algorithm and whatever rules they change for next week,” Jessica says. “And I’m just done.”
So instead of creating content hoping it reaches people, she’s started making content that’s simply real — and trusting that to be enough.
From Audience to Community: What’s the Difference?
Jessica and her husband spent years dreaming about the Story Haven before they built it. She’s the idea person, she told us, and he’s the one with the tech background who can take her “what if we could make this” and actually build it.
What pushed them to finally create something from scratch, rather than using an existing platform, was watching what happens to online groups over time. Jessica has run communities on social platforms before, and she noticed the same pattern again and again: people show up to consume, not to participate, and if the group moderator stops posting, the whole thing goes quiet. She realized she’d built an audience, not a community — and that distinction broke her heart.
An audience, Jessica explained, is one person talking to many. A community is many people talking to many people. That’s the shift the Story Haven was designed around: not a leader at the helm, but storytellers tending a shared space together.
What It Feels Like Inside
We’ve both spent time inside the Story Haven, and we can vouch for what Jessica has built. From the colors to the imagery to the way the rooms are labeled, it genuinely feels different the moment you walk in — calmer, almost like a spa for your nervous system. Jessica laughs when we tell her that, delighted, because that’s exactly the feeling she and her husband were going for.
Members can choose which rooms to join, whether that’s one or several, and there’s no pressure to keep up or catch up. Prayer requests posted in the Prayer Corner stay there, visible only to the people in that room. And when someone taps the “I’m praying for you” button, the person who shared the request gets a notification that says just that. Jessica told us about posting a serious prayer request a couple of months ago and getting that notification — and she still gets emotional talking about it. It wasn’t a heart or a thumbs-up. It was someone saying, I see you, I’m praying for you. Mary K. joked that her husband had basically redeemed the “like” button.
Being Known, Not Just Seen
We asked Jessica what genuine community looks like to her, and her answer stuck with us. Genuine community, she says, is about being known rather than merely seen. It’s the reciprocity of someone noticing when you’ve been quiet, paired with the freedom to not always be performing, teaching, or showing up polished. There’s room, Jessica points out, to show up in the middle of the mess and admit you’re still figuring things out — and that honesty matters more than any credential ever could.
That’s a mindset shift for a lot of writers, us included. We’re taught to build an audience — to chase followers, subscribers, and engagement. Jessica encourages a different posture: when you join the Story Haven as a storyteller, you get to create your own ecosystem, joining only the rooms that fit you, and showing up as a person among people rather than a personality performing for a crowd.
Storytellers, Not Influencers
Every member of the Story Haven is called a storyteller — a word Jessica chose intentionally. Since she was called into ministry almost ten years ago, stories have been her thing; she even calls herself a “story friend.” Anyone with a story can be a storyteller, she told us, and you don’t need a platform or a following to belong. Storytellers in the Story Haven aren’t positioned above anyone else in the community — they’re tending the space within it.
What Changes When People Stop Scrolling and Start Showing Up
We wanted to know what Jessica is actually seeing shift inside the community, compared to a typical social platform. Her answer: people slow down. There are no posted rules for how to use the Story Haven, no directive telling you what to do first. Instead, the rooms themselves create natural boundaries, so members aren’t overwhelmed with everything all at once, and there’s no backlog to catch up on. Whatever’s shared today is what’s there today.
That structure has surfaced a truth Jessica didn’t expect: wanting community and actually participating in it aren’t the same thing. Most of us do want deeper relationships, she reflects, but we’ve been trained to consume — to scroll, read, and move on to the next thing. Real community asks something different of us. It asks us to participate, to show up, and sometimes to be the first one to share something vulnerable.
Addressing Platform Fatigue
Sandy pushed Jessica on something we hear constantly from our own community: platform fatigue. After leaving social media, plenty of writers have already asked their audience to follow them to a newsletter or a podcast — and the thought of introducing yet another platform can feel like a nonstarter.
Jessica says she sees this fatigue everywhere, and her approach is to take the pressure off. The Story Haven is there when someone is ready for it, and joining doesn’t require bringing an entire audience along on day one. Storytellers can connect their blogs, podcasts, and websites with just a couple of clicks, which removes a layer of decision fatigue. Jessica would rather people come in, look around, and build trust in the space gradually — bringing their own people over slowly, once they’ve seen it’s worth it.
However the Story Haven grows from here, Jessica is clear that it was never meant to center her. If her name never appears on any of it, she says, she’s fine with that. It’s meant to be an even playing field — a campground, as she puts it, where everyone tends their own small fire but shares the same ground, rather than a collection of scattered, isolated groups.
One Simple First Step
We asked Jessica what she’d tell a writer who’s craving deeper community but doesn’t know where to start. Her advice: be the one to go first. Somebody always has to be. That might mean sending a text to someone you’d like to know better, inviting someone for coffee, or simply asking one more question after “how are you” instead of letting the conversation end there.
And to the writer who feels like she has to be everywhere online, constantly visible, constantly growing — Jessica offers this: you don’t have to be everywhere to be faithful. Visibility and faithfulness aren’t the same thing. If God has called you to serve a specific group of people, you don’t need six platforms and six algorithms to do it well. Start slow, stay intentional, and take care of what’s actually been entrusted to you.
This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.
