Church, online or off, is about the middle

I’m a fan of Seth Godin’s pithy wisdom along with thousands of other people.

I like him most when he pops bubbles, as he did with this comment over the weekend on The Paradox of the Middle of the Market.

The middle of the market is a paradox because of the inherent contradiction between the ease of reaching the nerds and the geeks and the need to reach the middle.

The solution, if there is one, is to enter a market to the enthusiastic cheers of those in search of the new, but to build a product/service that appeals to those in the middle. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, you hunker down and ignore those that first embraced you, obsessing instead on the needs and networks of the middle. It’s a difficult balancing act, but it’s the only one that works.

Ultimately, you end up disappointing the hard core that first found you, but because of their initial enthusiasm (and more important, because you designed your work for the masses in the first place), your product crosses the chasm and reaches a larger group. The formula starts with a service or product that’s purple enough to spread, but not so hyper-fashionable that it merely entertains the insiders.

Over the first several months of the NewSpring Web Church experiment, there’s one common denominator I’ve observed:

Almost all the people who are committed attenders, volunteers and those who depend on the Web Campus as their only form of church aren’t techno geeks.

Most are ordinary people who “need a job done.”

Most are, in a lot of ways, old school.

They’re not into pioneering a new form of church. Or rebelling from traditional church.

They’re just craving the word of God preached passionately, and they’re wanting to live out their faith in whatever environment helps them do that best, and according to the personal situation they are in.

That’s why our team works hard to resist adding layers of bells and whistles to the NewSpring Web Campus.

And why I personally think about my mother-in-law before I even make any suggestions about changes. (She is a new believer in south Louisiana who never thought about using twitter or Facebook or chatrooms until it became vital to living in Christian community on the Web Campus.)

How simple is too simple? How techie is too techie?

And how do we know when we’ve struck the right balance?

Filed under: web campus , community management, web campus

The rise of net campuses: Are local churches on the ropes?

Andy Stanley’s NorthPoint Community Church yesterday joined other progressive, nationally-known ministries in jumping on the internet campus trend.

I think it’s safe to say that what started out as an outreach experiment has quietly become a “standard” part of the modern technomedia church, which includes vodcasting and podcasting, streaming video of sermons, multi-site video teaching and the various social media efforts, including twitter, facebook, and community infrastructure.

Not only am I pumped for the good folks at NorthPoint, including John Saddington, Jeff Henderson, and Los Whittaker who are behind the initiative, I think having several heavyweight ministries exploring this terrain is only going to speed up our learning about how best to grow strong churches online.

This tweet about the news did catch my eye Tuesday, and I thought was worth commenting on:

Lifechurch, Central/Vegas, NewSpring, et al w/ net campus; now Saddleback & Northpoint…local churches better figure out a reason to exist. @BrianConard

For the record, I don’t think local churches will ever be replaced by cyberchurches.

But I think it’s already true that ubiquitous access to skilled, accessible and powerful preaching from the super-ministries of Perry Noble, Mark Driscoll, Andy Stanley, Matt Chandler and Francis Chan and others, along with their church “life” that can be shared through and in other media and online venues, are transforming people’s expectations of how a local church fits in the modern Christian life.

Especially if that local church is mediocre, passionless and tone deaf to the culture we live in.

I think it will “raise the game” for every church, since every demographic is adopting technology at a rapid pace, and the acceptance of modern worship (including web worship) is accelerating daily.

If anyone wants to bet against this culture shift, they should take a lesson from the demise of the newspaper industry, speaking as one with a foot in both cultures. (The traditional church and the traditional media are both presumptuous about how well they know their “audience” and are meeting their needs. Both have a deathly tendency toward believing that their audience isn’t smart enough to know what’s True and what’s good for them. And both like to arrogantly assume that their people “aren’t going anywhere,” despite the mushrooming number of choices around them.)

Small local churches will close. Large ministries will grow larger.

Only the excellent will survive.

The bigger question for the health of the church is how well this bridge generation — US — will develop the new leadership structures and new community structures that will provide the bone and sinew of “membership” of a “body of believers” in this new era.

Thoughts?

Filed under: community, ruminations, web campus , community management, culture, ruminations

A Web campus: More than a podcast with bells and whistles

Web Campuses or Internet Campuses or whatever you want to call them are all the rage.

And as the Web Campus pastor for NewSpring Church, I’m blessed to have a small part in leading the Big C church to rightly embrace the web for church, broadly defined, as an environment for worship, a vehicle for community and discipleship, and a medium for evangelism.

I take what I do seriously enough that I’m always sharpening my theological understanding of what we’re trying to do through the web campus. So, inspired by this page on Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church Internet Campus, i thought I’d share here my internal vision statement for the web campus that has been in place since before we launched.

It’s aimed at getting my ministry team and volunteers on the same page. It’s a work in progress. It’s not proof-texted. It’s not officially endorsed by my church leadership. But it is I think a healthy approach that recognizes a web campus as something far more than a podcast with bells on.

Come on. You know you want to help critique it.

Our mission is to make Jesus famous one person at a time, helping people worship God, grow in faith and live in Christ-centered community online.

We believe the web campus can follow the model of a Biblical church. It provides a venue for worship of God, Biblical teaching, and opportunity for community, discipleship and evangelism.

For the lost, it can be a very powerful tool in welcoming spiritual seekers to hear the word of truth in a setting that may not be as intimidating as physically attending a church.

For those Christians who are not fully committed to a local church, it can be a more open and inviting path to involvement in a local body of serving, discipling, evangelizing believers who are passionate about Jesus and obedient to his word.

We believe that online attenders can and should participate fully in the life of NewSpring Church, which considers itself one church in many locations.

As with every NewSpring campus, our online attenders will be strongly encouraged to get baptized by immersion after a decision for Christ, give, serve each other and the church in online and offline venues and proclaim the good news as the Lord gifts them and leads them. Periodically, we also will celebrate communion together, rightly instructed by a pastor, with online attenders gathering and taking their own elements. (See our five purposes below)

Attendence of the Web Campus should never be viewed as a legitimate way to “go to church” while avoiding the challenges or the commitments involved in faithful participation of a local church body. We do, however, believe that full, consistent, surrendered worship among a body of believers on the web campus is to be preferred to infrequent attendance of a local church and membership of it in name only for whatever reason.

We believe that online social and communication tools can be used to ensure that we are “meeting together” in worship and in Christ-exalting relationship with believers as well as serving as a witness to God corporately. But as the body of Christ, each with a role in discipling, serving and evangelizing within “communities of grace,” our success can only come through deep investment in individual lives and communities that must include some element of offline, bodily interaction.

Although we donʼt believe that physical presence is the only way we can fulfill our role in the body of Christ, we do want to strongly encourage people to gather physically wherever possible, such as by viewing the web campus in physical groups.

Overall, the web campus is more than just a podcast with a chat room. In fact, we recognize that some podcasters may be using our media to create a personal church experience that risks isolating them and tends toward a false understanding of the Christian life as private and solitary, rather than public and communal. The web campus offers a chance to lead podcasters toward a more complete experience and participation in church.

Our theological conviction is to offer attenders a 360-degree church experience: communal worship experience realized through our chat room or in physical gatherings, pastoral guidance from me and other NewSpring pastors, and abundant opportunities to take “next steps” in their walk with Jesus. I think you’ll agree that taken as a whole, the web campus can serve as someone’s church home, should they need it.

We want out attenders to:

• Worship God through time, talent, treasure and prayer.
• Grow Biblical relationships that spur greater communion and connection with God, the church and each other.
• Grow spiritually through Bible reading and study and other resources to develop their spiritual understanding, gifts and leadership abilities.
• Serve their church and community by meeting needs in ministry and missions
• Share their faith with unchurched people by sharing testimony and inviting people to worship services online or offline.

Filed under: ruminations, web campus , community, community management, discipleship, evangelism, theology, web campus rollout

Church community platforms are the next big idea

If there’s one nit to pick about the techno-church’s embrace of the web as a platform for advancing God’s kingdom, is that our hunches, ideas, and theories about how that might work doesn’t have much of a foundation of data to support it yet.

That’s why I’ve been so encouraged by the work that Drew Goodmanson and his team at Kaleo Church. Their research into church web sites and in examining churches’ use of community platforms has been eye-opening.

The big takeaway for me from Wednesday’s unveiling of the early findings of its research on community platforms was that among church tech influencers, such as web pastors, tech pastors, and communications directors, EVERYONE seems to be eyeing some kind of turn-key seamless community platform.

And EVERYONE is worried about the potential for creating Christian subcultures, given the so far dismal performance of Christian social networking sites in making in roads into the church.

That’s a good tension.

Take a look at the top five features or functionalities for the community platform:

1. Ability to find, register, and/or get details for events.
2. Ability to post prayer requests or needs.
3. Ability to find serving opportunities at the church based on interest or gifts.
4. Ability to join and interact with home/bible study groups.
5. Integration with existing church website.

The list seems to confirm my own hunch that there’s a deep need for relational connection both within and beyond the community of God right now, and that our physical churches are obviously not empowering or enabling their congregations in this vital area.

A church community platform can and should be evangelistically powerful.

It would be a shame indeed if fear or generational guilt surrounding the church of the past that was evangelistically weak and missionally challenged were to stop the people of God from living in the fullness of Christian community using our currently blossoming social technologies.

What we see in Acts church is not a church scared of subculture, but a subculture that embraces its role as one that is to build itself up for the purpose of evangelism and outreach.

Church leaders need to be helping Christians recognize that community is a means not an end in itself.

That’s not a technology issue. That’s a leadership issue.

Agree? Disagree?

Download a PDF of the study.

Filed under: community , community, community management, discipleship, evangelism, social action, social media, social networking

Are churches leveraging their members for radical personal ministry?

One of the most powerful and often undervalued parts of our faith is Jesus’ call for us to do personal ministry leveraged within “one body” of believers.

I think it’s in this area the web will make the greatest contribution to the church.

Perry Noble has always emphasized the importance of volunteers to NewSpring’s ministry. What gives NewSpring’s staff-led, excellence-oriented ministry theological coherence is that we should trust and encourage the body to do most of the ministry.

We have serving rates of more than 60 percent, which is impressive.

But I’ve always wondered whether there are some practical (but needless) barriers to the other 40 percent contributing. And whether the 60 percent who do contribute are being leveraged fully.

That’s where I think a ministry utility could be a killer app.

What if our church members were connected to each other, their resources for personal ministry were searchable and transparent, and they could self-organize and self-resource for personal ministry projects of their own?

Such a church app would generate a flowering of ministry and community like we’ve never seen, and create hands-on discipleship into the bargain.

Want to host a small group? Post your study and your credentials, recruit people, meet online, share materials.

Want to organize an evangelistic block party? Find and contact all the church members in your neighborhood. Create a ministry account to collect donations.

Got a spare washer and dryer? Pledge it to Jim and Bob’s inner-city ministry where you know it will meet a need and be used to share the gospel face to face. Find someone with a truck to pick up and drop off.

Want to get groups of people to church who don’t have reliable transportation? See who’s willing to offer rides, and create a route planner.

Have special expertise? Read what’s happening in other ministries and offer your guidance.

You get the idea … the possibilities are endless. Either as a series of web apps working off a central church database that has an API or as one seamlessly integrated piece of software.

No matter how many fancy commercial web apps there or how many social networking-savvy members we have, trying to create micro-communities of purpose on borrowed and cobbled-together platforms is a real struggle.

That’s why I hope the web developers and web thinkers of the web church — maybe you! — will build an app or apps for ministry.

People just don’t have the information they need about each other to imagine potential ministry, let alone the simple, integrated organizational tools to make it achievable.

It seems to me that too many of our serving opportunities are church-heavy. They are defined by the church, they are primarily for the benefit of the church (although I’m not devaluing the evangelistic purpose of church gatherings,) and they take place on church grounds.

The more our churches can release their members’ resources beyond the church walls, the more impact we are bound to have, on the world and each other.

Filed under: community , community, community management, social action, social media, social networking

What do web campus attenders tell us about church?

If there was a “bottom line” to the social revolution we’re seeing on the web, it’s that we are more completely aware that the individual is king.

You just can’t control how an individual uses or experiences your product, your service or your message.

The “consumer” always has been king of course.

But, in the past, for the most part, we could get away with holding people hostage to the experience we wanted them to have. We couldn’t tell what they thought about it. And we didn’t really care because we thought we knew best anyway.

What does this have to do with the church?

Just think about the preceding paragraphs in relation to the typical service.

As the web campus pastor, it has only taken three weeks for me to confirm my hunch that the format or the function of the typical service just can’t survive intact online.

• Folks are staying for 10 minutes, an hour or 10 secs. Rarely the whole service.
• Folks are skipping the “worship” and coming for the message
• Folks are viewing full screen with friends and family.
• Folks are chatting and taking notes while listening to the message.
• Folks are snacking on the audio or video of the web campus as they’re cooking lunch.
• Folks are reviewing what they thought they heard from God in church earlier that day.
• Folks are previewing to see if they’re interested in going to church in person.
• Folks are attending because it’s a well of life in a spiritual desert where they are.
• Folks are attending because the kids were sick and couldn’t make it to church.
• Folks are attending because they love their home church and community, but they’d much rather get their teaching from Perry Noble.
• Folks just can’t wait until the podcast comes out on Tuesday.
• Folks prefer a church and a community that can stick with them because they’re so mobile.
• Folks are there because …

Fill in the [BLANK]

So: What’s the point of the service in our faith? Should we do it any differently? Can we?

And/or: Are our web campuses showing us where we’re not meeting needs in our physical churches?

Filed under: ruminations, web campus , community management, web campus

My definition of church success

When I’m asked how I know whether the NewSpring Web Campus is working, I’m not settling for any standard of success lower than this:

Everyone evangelizing.

Everyone pastoring.

Everyone discipling.

Everyone serving.

Everyone meeting needs.

That’s was the gist of my remarks at the end of Monday’s interview with Tony Morgan.

I guess you could say I was on a soapbox, again.

Here’s what got my dander up: All of us, me included, get so wrapped up in talk about the importance of community — and the new fake measurables of community, like friends, and fans and followers and comments — that we’re constantly in denial of how badly each of us, as the church, has really lived it day-to-day.

How much time do I spend every day really getting to know and love others? Is the other stuff I spend my time doing really more important? What does it say about my heart?

That’s right: Community is a heart condition.

You don’t see fruit for evangelism or discipleship, really, not with something as dangerous and explosive as the Gospel without real, honest-to-goodness, investment in the lives of other people. (And yes, that can happen online just as authentically as offline.)

Community is life on life. Many to Many.

Not few to many.

Not many to few.

Many to many.

And you can’t do that without the heart of Christ.

That’s a pretty good measuring stick, wouldn’t you say?

The fake community bubble is about to burst according to this and this social media guru.

Thank God. There’s less to distract us.

Now how do we get there?

Filed under: community, social media , community, community management, social media

The web church is the new reformation

It was one of the remarks on Twitter from my boss Tony Morgan that was deceptively easy to glance over.

“Multi-site changes everything. Campuses on the Web changes everything else.”

It resonated with me, because from the first day I felt God calling me to explore how to be the church in the digital age, I was confident that the web church will herald a new reformation.

Those are big words. Weighty words, for sure. Maybe a tad hyperbole. But I’m serious.

In the first reformation, the technology of the printing press made it possible for any believer who could read to match up what Christ said about access to God with what the Catholic Church said about it. The “priesthood of all believers” was the result.

In the new reformation, the technology of the web has made it possible for people to be the church without “the church.” Now anyone who is part of the priesthood of all believers could, if they were very intentional, create their own, or join a pre-existing, fully Christ-centered community.

This is not about 20th-century, lone-ranger Christianity, where “private faith” is what’s important, accountability is non-existent and commitment is quaint.

I’m suggesting that we now have the tools and the conditions that could allow for a faithful believer to join himself to a self-organized community of fellow believers who intentionally devote themselves to sound teaching, perhaps through videoteaching.com, share their lives and work with common purpose, guided by the Holy Spirit, to bring the love of Jesus to the world.

Is that not theologically legitimate church? Could you not have a physical campus-less church and still be the church as Christ intended it?

What I think about often is how inefficient the current structure of the church today really is if it is supposed to be all about making disciples of Jesus.

Think about how much money is locked up in land and buildings. Think about how much money relatively small congregations spend on supporting pastors and administrative staff when they simply cannot — and don’t have to — compete with the incredible teaching resources now available online or in your corner Christian bookstore. Wouldn’t the leadership of mature believers be sufficient to provide solid pastoral guidance?

Think about how few smaller congregations are contagious about their love of Jesus.

Is the disciple-making machinery of church the worship service or the community the worship service creates?

If the technology is here, or coming soon, where sophisticated worship services can be experienced in all their intensity anywhere in HD, the real work ahead for the church is learning how to guide and manage community, the kind of authentic community that, in Acts, added to its number daily and changed the history of the world.

I think a lot is going to boil down to questions about what’s the role of the weekly service in daily worship? And how important will it be to have a weekly physical gathering spot that belongs uniquely to a specific community of believers?

Those are the kinds of weighty issues the Web Church is field-testing. Nothing less.

Thoughts?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, web campus , community, community management, discipleship, social action, web campus

The last thing a web church needs is another social network

We’re not going to create a community on NewSpring’s web campus.

I didn’t misspeak. I’m dead straight. We don’t have any plans for any special community infrastructure to be built into our web campus.

Why? Because we think our attenders are already in communities, and they don’t need to add another one to their very long list.

We want attenders to create relationships, but we believe that they already have plenty of tools to make community happen. If they want community, they’ve got it.

Of course, we’re praying for great conversations in our web campus chat room. But we trust the Holy Spirit will lead people to connect them outside our worship services.

Be honest: Do people really respond when churches force them to befriend and nurture random strangers? Who can claim real success from a lifegroups model that involves placing people with leaders they don’t know?

What if the way to honor God’s desire for us to be in Christ-centered community was for every church attender to be constantly seeking and finding people within their existing networks that he wants them to pour into and to take those relationships deeper, individually or in groups?

The vision I’ll be casting to our web attenders is simple: Get to know one another. Share any details your comfortable sharing so that you can take your friendships further. Maybe that’s an email. Maybe that’s your Twitter ID. Perhaps it’s inviting them to friend you on Facebook.

We’re not going to hold your hand or do community for you.

Got a problem with that? Why?

Filed under: community, social media, web campus , community, community management, Facebook, social media, social networking, Twitter, web campus, web campus rollout

There is danger in confusing great work with a great witness

Fundraising and social good using the social web is the hot, new thing.

And there’s something that does bother me about this.

In the age of the Internet, everyone “gets” that hundreds or thousands of small acts amount to a great work.

Mobilizing people used to be one of our distinctives, back when organizing and motivating large numbers of common people around a common aim used to be remarkable. (Not that we did it very well or made the most of it, mind you.)

Now everyone can “be the change.” Not just the church.

I’ve been wondering whether the opportunity to see the power of God’s people will get diminished now that everyone is part of a body, an open, movable, large-scale network, an organism rather than organization?

A temptation might be to mimic or out-do non-profits and charities and the various market-ainment vehicles, such asExtreme Makeover or Oprah’s Big Give and their online derivatives.

And then I realize that great work doesn’t necessarily produce great witness, even if a church or church folk are behind it.

A great witness is selfless and sacrificial and personal. Because selfless and sacrificial and personal doesn’t happen without the power of God.

It’s when we make much of God that great work happens, and it’s quite possible that it might look just like Extreme Makeover. But it’s not always when we do great work that making much of God happens.

As we step into the world of online-community building, I believe all of us in the techno-church are going to need to remember that.

How do you think we can keep it straight?

Filed under: community, evangelism, social media , community management, social action, social media