Web church success may be tied to customization

I’ve been looking at the Hartford Seminaryanalysis of megachurch attenders because I think it could be useful in understanding the Web Church’s potential mission field and how it can extend what we’ve learned from modern church methods. You can read past posts in this series here, here and here.

One of the study’s most dramatic conclusions was that:

involvement at these (and perhaps all) churches may be less about creating an idealized plan to move someone toward commitment and more about providing many ways by which people could craft their unique, customized spiritual experience to meet their needs.

It’s logical that the Web Church respond to this apparent desire for customizing church experience. Web culture, after all, is about empowering individual choice, and letting you set the terms of your engagement with content and people.

Many NewSpring Web Campus attenders are already actively engaged in designing their own path to spiritual growth and assembling the building blocks of an online church life, spurred on by the breathtaking amount and quality of podcasts, books, and blogs that fan the flames of someone’s spiritual fires on demand.

There’s no reason to think that wouldn’t extend to all aspects of church life as they migrate online. Someone could choose one church’s online worship experiences, another’s online small groups, yet another’s online discipleship program etc. and another’s online outreach and missions program.

I think the megachurch lesson here is that offering many paths for spiritual exploration and engagement and involvement could be the Web Church’s supreme value proposition.

That could include providing social guides or personal recommendations toward other trusted, high-quality content. Or it could be offering opportunities for spiritual growth in partnership with regional, national and international ministries. It could even be providing the support systems, resources and “open access” to the Web church’s people to build new ministries and recruit for them across the web.

A believer’s attachment, then, to a Web church might not be traditional “membership,” but in the personal relationships with individual believers as they come across them in different ministry area.

What do you think?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, web campus , community, discipleship, evangelism, icampus, web campus

Reflections on an amazing beta test of the NewSpring Web Campus

NewSpring has a history of launching things before they are ready. I guess that’s our way of making sure that we’re desperately depending on God.

Joshua hit the wall

At 2 a.m. Sunday, NewSpring’s creative director/web strategist/sometime front-end coder, Joshua Blankenship, had admitted defeat.

The all-important chatroom on the NewSpring Web Campus wasn’t functional. Joshua told me later he wasn’t expecting that we could move forward with our beta test at all. Next week’s launch was looking iffy, too.

God had other plans.

Today’s web campus “private” beta was successful beyond everyone’s wildest dreams.

What started out as a closed test broke-out across Twitter world in an unplanned way after someone in Overland Park, Kan., twittered about it.

We decided to embrace our “public” beta, and we ended up with nearly 250 visitors in our two services. We saw only a few minor issues, most of them user-interface related, and most of them known beforehand.

It was tremendously encouraging to receive so many positive reviews from our techno-evangelist friends in the “Big C” church.

But from the campus pastor’s point of view, I was even more amazed — and humbled — at how brilliantly our video production and web staff and 20-strong volunteer team performed today under considerable pressure, without much practice, with a total unity of purpose.

From the beginning, our volunteers — most would admit not being technologically sophisticated at all — were willing to believe on faith that God was in control of our Web Campus and would bring glory to himself through it. More than one volunteer shed tears of joy today when they finally saw what was possible.

Video producer Will Rodes (left) and Web genius Joshua Blankenship working the web campus chatroom

Volunteers Tim and Rhonda Evatt

Volunteers Micah Swift, Elaine Payne and Lynn Whitfield

Amid all the techno-chatter, there were some amazing stories:

• We had two people watching from hospital beds who received encouragement and prayer.
• We had one couple burst into tears while they watched video of baptisms in the web service stream.
• We had another person, struggling deeply, stumble across the campus while randomly surfing and receive comfort and prayer from two others who had experienced a similar heartbreak.

The web campus ministered to people. It was authentic. It was grace.

All I can say is “Thank you, Jesus!”

I don’t know how I got to be in this place and in this time, amid an extraordinary, unexplainable move of God. I’m all too ordinary. All I can do is praise God for his grace on me, and our church, and beg that he continues to shine his face on our ministry.

We had nearly 200 salvations today at NewSpring’s three physical campuses, bringing the year’s total to 650.

Join with me in praying that, with the help of the web campus, the number of those placing their trusting in Jesus for the first time will be multiplied by 1,000 times this year.

Filed under: community, ruminations, social media, volunteers, web campus , community, evangelism, icampus, icampus rollout, web campus, web campus rollout

NewSpringers “get it” when it comes to our web campus

I can see why the concept of online church would make some people cautious.

I understand that folks are skeptical about whether you can have true online-only community.

And I expect some folks to be plain dismissive.

But as I pointed out in a comment on Church Crunch recently, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response I’ve gotten from regular church members here at NewSpring about our web campus.

When I cast vision Sunday to our launch volunteer team (of all ages, backgrounds and technical aptitudes, mind you) that the web campus is a legitimate way to do church, I braced for at least some resistance.

Zip. Nothing. Nada.

Thought you might want to read some of the encouragement I have gotten from them via email.

“I am so excited about our new web church. I think it is going to go through the roof.” – Cheryl

“For years I’ve heard people say (who were tired of standard church) we watch (TV preacher) for church .. webcampus will offer much more to people in that position, I’m excited.” – Mike

“Looking forward to this spectacular ministry” – Gloria

“At first I didn’t really know what to think about it (except that I wanted to be a part of it in some way) but now I am just really excited to get it cranked up” – Micah

Yes, NewSpring Church is awesome.

It has awesome, can-do, ready-for-anything members who believe God is HUGE and wants us to use everything at our disposal to round-up his lost children.

That’s the answer for why we’re growing like crazy, in case you’re wondering.

But you knew that already.

Filed under: volunteers, web campus , icampus, icampus rollout, web campus

Considering using Tokbox for small groups?

Tokbox fever is in the air after this week’s videochat orgy among the church Twitterati.

The platform has sizzle for sure. (It even has an API). But for me the question is:

Can Tokbox be used effectively for online small groups? Will the platform, and its potential for technical issues, distract people, or will it add to group interaction and sense of connectedness?

I started looking at Tokbox in late November based on a recommendation from Dave Adamson of Liquid Church, a member of the Internet campus Pastors Ning group, who was using it for just that purpose.

Toward the end of a five week test, Dave was already calling his TokBox experiment “an outstanding success,” with all seven participants, from four countries, agreeing to continue the group. (I haven’t heard back from Dave about the results of a survey he used to evaluate the experience. I’m hoping he’ll post something soon.)

With all the chatter about Tokbox and our campus launch coming up soon, I decided to take it for an interaction test-drive this morning with the help of some members of NewSpring’s CommTeam and a few invited guests.

We all agreed that hearing a voice and seeing a face helps tremendously with creating a sense of connection in a way that leaves text chat in the dust.

And a one-click-to-join, nothing to download, no-need to register system like Tokbox is going to be about as easy as it’s going to get for a multi-person video and/or audio chat solution aimed at a broad audience. (Tokbox even has a Facebook Firefox extension.)

We felt the video and voice quality was more than adequate for small group  purposes, and the latency did not seem unreasonable, although we did have U.S. only participants. And the platform is easily able to handle between 6 and 12, which is the optimal small group size.

But we also agreed that small group leaders and the participants would probably benefit from an orientation before plunging in.

Here are the top 5 initial suggestions for the “ground rules” we came up with. If you’ve used Tokbox or some other multi-person video chat, please add your thoughts in the comments.

1. Walk everyone as a group through the mute/unmute, and camera pause/unpause functions in the individual chat window as well as the user’s microphone settings. The ability to amplify the mic, in particular, is very helpful.
2. Everyone in the group must use headphones. The echo that comes from hearing the conversation through someone’s computer speakers is just annoying.
3. Everyone must be in a quiet, private location so there’s no ambient sound or the possibility for interruptions. (For instance. If you’re borrowing public WiFi, try sitting in your car, rather than a coffee shop.)
4. Everyone should agree to use a sign, preferably something that stands out easily amid the faces and lets everyone know someone wants to speak. Simply raising your hand to cover the camera works just fine, or you could use something like a piece of white paper.
5. Group leaders should be comfortable directing and guiding the conversation, rather than always fishing for responses to questions from the group at large. That will cut down on the awkwardness of the conversational hand-offs.

There’s bound to be interpersonal awkwardness initially, and maybe some clumsiness in keeping the conversation moving. But isn’t that something even face-to-face groups grapple with?

What about you?

(P.S. If you are an Internet Campus pastor and want to be part of the Ning group, drop me a line for an invite.)

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, social media , chat, community management, discipleship, icampus, social media

Considering seeker-sensitive small groups for the online church

I read the book Simple Church over the course of my recent trip to LifeChurch.tv.

My biggest takeaway was the critical importance of designing an online ministry process that moves attenders along the journey of discipleship, perhaps even more so for Internet campuses than our physical campuses.

We need to have an excellent live worship experience. But if we’re going to be a true church, the “next steps” have to be clearly defined, and we have to show that a reasonable number of our attenders are continually progressing toward a more complete faith.

As with many other Internet campuses, our plan from the beginning was to strongly encourage participation in online small groups to provide a more intimate community and a pathway for deeper discipleship.

But I have wondered about more radical possibilities based on a remark by LifeChurch.tv Online Community Pastor Tony Steward that the web church movement “could have the form of an attractional church and the expression of a house church movement.”

Maybe the traditional small-group model — reading and encouraging response to scripture or scripture-based topical studies after “churching” has already happened — is too linear and too closed, and actually underplays small group ministry potential?

What about structuring the discipleship process around a model the Internet seems built for: movement and causes? What if the model was supposed to be more explosive rather than immersive? And set on a spiral rather than a straight line?

What if a 12-week project to dig a well in an African village was itself a complete, self-contained, scripture-saturated discipleship journey of its own? It would serve as the way to introduce Jesus and his teaching to the spiritually seeking or spiritually growing, offer a method for new believers to demonstrate Jesus love for the world, and offer a non-threatening opportunity to engage the lost by soliciting financial support? There’s no more authentic relationship than one forged in mutual action toward a common goal that everyone can buy into from an ethical standpoint, regardless of your spirituality.

The attractional live online worship experience could be the starting point for commitment to a discipleship spiral. Or the discipleship spiral could be the way to point people to the start of a committed spiritual journey. 
This kind of discovery model is potentially self-replicating. And it can be progressive if a new practical focus is used to spur growth in each of the various aspects of the Christian life.

By comparison, forcing everyone to start the spiritual journey with a commitment to Christ might strike seekers as backwards. And the “next steps” philosophy — bring in then equip then send out — makes it too easy for spiritual formation to remain incomplete or compartmentalized.

The spiral pathway just seems to fit the DNA of the social web, which allows for “communities of interest” to self-organize and constantly form and re-form without paying much attention to traditional leadership structures. And it recognizes that our real audience should be the lost, not the time-crunched Christian who wants a convenient church option.

What say you?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, web campus , community, discipleship, evangelism, icampus

Watcha’ talkin’ ’bout?

A few weeks ago, I dropped a comment on a status update from one of my British friends, and it touched off a short exchange that made me wonder about how we communicate relevantly in the conversational culture of the Internet.

My friend, Andrew Stannard, a globe-trotting musician and fairly hip guy was hanging out with another friend of mine, Guy Banim, a British expat who lives in Brussels and works for the European Union in Afghanistan.

Both global citizens. Both culturally savvy.

But they were helplessly lost when i used the word “baller.” (It was my way of sounding hip, I suppose. Note to self: repent.)

Andrew is back home from the Palace de Banim in Brussels…..nice beer too! - 5 Comments 6:39pm

Nicholas Charalambous at 1:23pm November 17

lucky you. I wish I could hang with him. He’s a baller.

Guy Banim at 7:40pm November 17

gosh, a baller??? it says in the online dictionary that’s someone who’s got ‘money & hos all over the world’. I’ve got a hoe in the garden for doing the weeding but not sure all over the world

Tanya Sealey at 4:21am November 18

You live in Brussels Guy – the hoes of the world comes to you (well, at least those from the european union)

Andrew Stannard at 8:47am November 18

well you certainly travel a lot Guy…..maybe I was being naive in thinking it was only business and resolving conflicts that made you travel

Nicholas Charalambous at 12:06pm November 18

You know, living in Carolina, I have to talk jive. It’s like a requirement now.

Guy’s definition obviously wasn’t the one i was thinking about. I was thinking of these definitions.

So all of this got me thinking about how we, the church, are currently defining “relevance.”

You have to know your audience if you’re going to communicate meaningfully. And I know one of the reasons why NewSpring’s Perry Noble is so stinkin incredible as a communicator is that his sermons always incorporate lots of everyday cultural references, like Cracker Barrell biscuits, sweet tea, and  Sullivan’s peanut butter and fudge cake etc. etc. that makes everyone in the Upstate feel like 1) he’s an ordinary fella and 2) that God can speak into the most ordinary of circumstances ie. your life.

That’s the biggest lesson I learned from a dozen years in the media industry: empathy, trust, and all that good stuff comes from knowing where people are coming from; how they live and how they think.

And all of those cultural references we take so much pride in may well be lost on folks just a few hundred miles north, south, east and west, let alone the global citizens worshipping at our Internet campuses.

Personally, I hope pastors (Perry included) don’t try and downplay cultural specificity and potentially lessen their authenticity and persuasive power. There are obviously ways to communicate around (sub)cultural obstacles. And in global online church culture, where most people, presumably, will have lots of “churching” options, will it even matter? (If some don’t “connect,” there are plenty of others, presumably, who will.)

But something tells me we can’t be too cavalier about that, especially when we want to send out our members for constant and continual conversational evangelism in social media mission fields.

What do you think relevance will mean in the polyglot online culture?

Do Internet campuses have a moral obligation to cater to a potentially global audience? This guest post from British LifeChurch.tv partner Dana Byers seems to suggest we should.

Thoughts?

Filed under: community, evangelism, ruminations, social media , community, culture, evangelism, icampus

What does online giving tell us about online church commitment?

No one at NewSpring knows what to expect when it comes to giving on the Internet Campus.

During our weekend visit to LifeChurch.tv, one of the pioneers of the web church movement, we found out a few intriguing giving factoids that didn’t help clear up anything:

• online attenders give at a lower rate than physical attenders, (although it is still higher than I was expecting.)
• giving doesn’t happen much during services
• there’s no connection between online group members and higher giving

From that, it might be tempting to infer that online church breeds a lukewarm disciple. After all, in scripture, Jesus repeatedly asks for a total commitment,and that often begins with a question of how we view our money: “where our treasure is our heart is also.“

(The giving in the church at large is so scandalously low that traditionalists should hold off on any tut-tutting.)

But LifeChurch.tv Online Community Pastor Tony Steward suggested another lens: the concept of “belonging” may be very different online than it is in the real world. In his view, the web’s DNA is all about choosing your level of commitment, and it may not be helpful to make a distinction between “members” and “attenders” and then impose expectations, such as tithing, in accordance with that.

In fact, Campus Pastor Brandon Donaldson told us that the campus staff and the digerati team have discussed modifying the giving language. They prefer to use words like “donate” and “give,” which are much more part of web parlance, rather than emphasizing tithing.

NewSpring Senior Pastor Perry Noble preaches boldly and consistently about the importance of worshipping God with our money, and challenges our church to give our tithe back to God. This year, where other churches are struggling, our collections are significantly up. So tithing language won’t be optional for us.

But I am intrigued by the possibilities of using the Internet to help us greater leverage the time, talent and money of Christians at the current (and relatively low) levels of commitment, as well as offer a way for a progressive pathway to step up that commitment until it is total.

LifeChurch.tv is among many ministries studying Barack Obama’s successes in mobilizing millions — and raising hundreds of millions — to see what the church can learn from their community-building and social media techniques.

There’s no doubt that our combined good works shine before men and offer a witness to Christ.

But what kind of benefits do you see in using more of a “movement” ethos online? And what kinds of costs?

Filed under: discipleship, web campus , community, icampus