Community is about doing something together

Reading Mark Batterson’s recent interview with Neue Ministry on community rung so many bells it felt like a carnival in my head this morning.

Some choice snippets: (emphasis mine)

“To me, the greatest adventure is God inviting us into this thing called the Great Commission—how He didn’t call us to do something on our own. God loves the adventure of doing things together … We have a range of about 90 different groups, and they range from Bible studies to running a marathon together. They are so diverse; they’re as diverse as our leaders are. What it is, is just finding touch points. … I think one reason why God wants to be in commission with us is because nothing brings people together like common mission.

…. Ultimately, we want people to have a face-to-face, physical community, but we’re discovering that often starts with a virtual community …

To me, my late-blooming fascination with technology, which resulted in pastoring the NewSpring Web Campus, is all about exploring how our social web tools can help us become visiable, powerful, contagious, “communities of grace.”

Slowly but surely, i believe we are building a community on the web campus. But i can’t shake the feeling that the more opportunities we give to our attenders to do something together, the more likely we are to building deep, lasting relationships — and far quicker, with far more of them.

For instance, the kind of lifestyle groups Mark talks about absolutely flourish online. Crafts, photos, music, you name it. It takes my breath away just thinking about the impact that one surrendered Christ follower can make in that kind of environment.

Do you have thoughts to share in crafting an online active community strategy?

Filed under: community, social media, web campus , social action, social media, social networking

Web church as “safe space” to explore Christian faith

This is my last post exploring the fascintating conclusions from Hartford Seminary’s groundbreaking study on megachurch attenders and what the web church can learn from it. You can read posts one, two and three and four if you missed them.

One of the more fascinating parts of the study showed that:

some people intentionally don’t want to establish friendships, even if they are highly committed to the church. Certain people come because they can be, and want to remain, anonymous. … almost a third of those at these churches over five years still report having very few close friends there. For some attenders even long-term participation in the megachurch is about something other than having a network of close friendships.

Let’s face it: “community” can be intimidating to some people, especially those who may only be just starting to live the Christian life.

That’s where the Web church’s perceived weakness — its so-called anonymity — might prove to be one of its greatest assets.

To begin with, it might provide a private, anonymous, low-commitment way to experience Christians and Christian teaching. But there’s also a clear path toward Christian community for those who want to explore it in a controlled environment, calibrated along a continuum of casual conversation, friending, commenting, messaging and physical meetups, to name just a few.

From a theological standpoint and a practical standpoint, discipleship occurs best in a community context, and the Web Church could provide that safe, community space in a believers’ formative years.

Thoughts?

Filed under: community, discipleship, web campus , community, evangelism, social media

Is your web campus embracing your physical church attenders?

A church would be foolish not to see a Web Campus as a key to its growth at physical locations.

And a Web Campus would be foolish to ignore its church’s physical worshipers as a way to be successful.

One of the most biggest realizations we’ve made through the first few months of the Web Campus ministry is that our campus serves many different audiences.

Our Web Campus primarily targets the unchurched and the dechurched. People who have been relocated from your church who can’t find a good, Bible-believing church near them. Maybe people who are searching for God or for a church and seem to “connect” to NewSpring’s vision and theology.

Then there’s the sizable number of our attenders who are connected to our Anderson, Greenville and Florence campuses and are sick or out of town or just aren’t able to make it to church that week. It’s wise not to overlook the power of that second constituency to the Web Campus ministry.

No. 1In the mobile society that we all now live, physical attenders are bound to have many family and friends spread across the nation without access to a church like NewSpring, and who have been impressed by the ministry during visits or through casual conversations.

As we know, the power of personal ministry is greatest in relationships of deep love and intimate connection, and it’s in these family connections that a web campus or web ministry can best flourish.

Each family member or friend can have a shared experience — whether during the service in the chatroom or private IM or in conversations after the service. And the friend or family member can provide the instant and extended support and ministry needed by every believer to flourish in the Lord.

No. 2. Those physical attenders exposed to the Web Campus, have a natural opportunity to share a “preview” of the NewSpring experience with those that might be skeptical, reluctant or intimidated so that they can then be invited to a physical church location.

And to prove this isn’t just theory, here’s a story that providentially dropped into my email box Sunday:

I normally attend the Greenville Campus and serve on the care team. I was really bummed this morning because I had a terrible migraine and would not make it ! Thankfully I was able to attend today’s 11:15 service on the web. What an amazing experience! It was awesome to have a chance to interact with everyone in a chat room environment during Perry’s message.

After the service I came into contact with two people who have been wanting to attend the Greenville campus but didn’t want to go alone. I look forward to meeting both of them there this Sunday!

I also posted a link on my Face book profile at the start of the service . I received a reply from one of my contacts thanking me for the posting. She and her husband attended the Anderson campus last week and were looking forward to this Sundays service. She had fallen ill and couldn’t attend. Thanks to the web campus they were able to hear Perry’s powerful message today! I never ceases to amaze me to see how God move’s in our church. I can’t wait to see what’s next !

Got a take on this? Got a story or several of your own?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, social media, web campus , community, discipleship, evangelism, social media, web campus

Storytelling is about storymaking

Everyone has a story.

But not everyone knows how to tell a story.

I want to do everything in my power to encourage a greater use of personal stories in my ministry here at NewSpring. But a key to success is recognizing that stories don’t just happen. They are made.

That’s media 101.

I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of “spontaneous” stories that we share about what God has done or is doing in our lives.

I’m not saying that stories are only stories if they follow specific narrative forms, like a personal testimony.

And I’m not saying that stories can’t be generated by ordinary people using ordinary tools everyone has at their disposal.

I am saying I think that we’re being naive if we think that our responsibility ends the moment that we ask people to share their story with us.

There are ways staff or trained volunteers can employ traditional media techniques to help people:

See their story. This is about recognizing when a private experience of God or a spiritual learning can carry a message of the gospel and/or help teach others about how to respond faithfully to his call on believers.

Express their story. This is about being a “midwife” to the story, making someone comfortable sharing their story, and helping them choose the best tools to capture the story in multimedia.

Shape their story. This is about framing the story by putting it in a context where it will offer the maximum impact and the maximum exposure. That could be focusing the message to speak to a particular topic or audience. That could be choosing the media for the story, the length of the story, or whether the story should be able to stand alone or whether it depends on its place within a wider web of information.

God commands everyone to tell of his good works. This isn’t optional.

In fact, the true richness of our faith and the true greatness of our God can only be captured by releasing the stories in the lives of every faithful follower.

And churches have a critical role to play in harnessing and focusing that storytelling — even, or perhaps especially, now that everyone has the tools to be a media creator.

Filed under: social media , social media, storytelling

When Easter is all Greek to me. Part 1

This was my first Easter as a pastor, and what an Easter it was.

Record attendance of 15,400 at NewSpring’s four campuses — 803 on the Web Campus alone — and 322 people met Jesus, seven of them on the web.

It got me to thinking about the type of Greek Orthodox Easter that I celebrated with my family in North London when I was a kid.

Talk about traditional.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the eastern Orthodox churches make catholic churches look contemporary. Lots of icons, stained glass, incense, robes, an altar that isn’t visible to the congregation.

And everything in a foreign language.

Yes, it really was Greek to me.

The entire service, from the psalms, to the prayers to the homily, were spoken in Ancient Greek.

Easter along with Christmas, just as in the south, were big turnout days for North London’s huge Greek Community. We would wear our Sunday best along with a fixed expression of “solemnity” as we stood and sat (but mostly stood) through two and three hour services that I couldn’t understand a single word of.

Looking back on my path to God, I can’t deny that I felt the tug of the Holy Spirit year after year at those events. But I didn’t have a hope that I would ever hear the power of the gospel for salvation.

I have a great deal of respect for my orthodox cousins, and its theology is well, “orthodox,” but i just can’t understand how you would want to keep good news to yourself.

That has got to break the heart of Jesus.

And if it wasn’t for NewSpring, I’d still be on my Highway to Hell.

So forgive me if I just couldn’t care less about what people think about using a song like that inside a worship service.

God is undeniably moving at NewSpring, and I’m pretty sure that the energy behind the whole of the modern evangelical church movement comes down to two very simple things.

We talk to be understood.

We speak into people’s lives where they are.

That’s it.

Lights. Fancy video. Rock music. Social media. Whatever. In our noisy culture, that just earns us the right to attention and to be heard.

I came to Jesus at NewSpring while reporting a story that started out as an expose on whether NewSpring was really teaching the Bible and “right doctrine” or whether it wasn’t all just entertainment and a personality cult.

So you can see how that turned out for me.

Criticize all you like if you believe that Jesus needs to be harder to get to. You will be answerable to Jesus just as we are.

But you might want to remember Jesus very own words:

49 John answered, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.” 50 But Jesus said to him, “Do not stop him, for the one who is not against you is for you.”

Filed under: ruminations , culture, evangelism, social media

Is this the front door to the church in the 21st century?

I read this interesting post from social media/PR guru Brian Solis about the future of the news industry, and I couldn’t help thinking that he may also be describing the 21st century “front door” to our churches.

Solis’ imagines the new news industry as personality-focused, community-based, and distributed through the network.

An information producer, passionate about his “subject,” will cultivate a network of people who will help him create content and ultimately publish it through his network’s statusphere and its viral effects. Content serves as the supply of “social objects” around which conversations occur and networks build.

As a former media exec, turning the focus away from the industrial model of news organizations to individual “information evangelists” was almost exactly the blueprint for the future of news I was trying evangelize myself inside the E.W. Scripps Co. beginning in 2005.

Why wouldn’t the “good news” industry work the same? Isn’t this proved by the rise of the pastor personality who uses online social tools to proclaim the good news and gather and “care” for a flock? (And also the decline of the denomination and the church-as-institution?)

Rarely a day that goes by on the NewSpring Web Campus that someone doesn’t say they first heard about NewSpring through NewSpring Senior Pastor Perry Noble’s phenomenally successful blog or the NewSpring podcast.

I think there are a lot of opportunities for traditional church pastors, online pastors and thoughtful church members to serve as a new breed of online evangelist.

And if that’s true, we need to pay for more attention to and what information people receive, process and pass using social media, as well as why and how.

I fear that most churches’ current emphasis on promoting invites and interest in church in our ambient friendship networks online aren’t really all that effective, and worse, may actually be turning people off.

Maybe the news industry can teach the “good news” industry something. At its most successful (online or offline, professional or amateur), journalism delivers information that’s useful, easy to understand, and easy to apply. Some of it is practical, like how to save money, raise good kids etc. And some is just ambient knowledge, so you can be part of conversations and build friendships around what you know and like.

When it comes to evangelizing Jesus “in the network,” the new front door of the church, we need to start with first principles, not assuming that anyone who reads us knows anything about Christianity.

We need to embrace seeker-sensibility by making our message less about church, or even the Bible. We need filter everything we say so that it’s useful, easy to consume and more relevant to everyday people who don’t care about “religion” and are just trying to live life the best they can.

What if the “new evangelist” did what great teachers and preachers, just like Jesus, have always done: Take the stuff of life, the stories of our culture, the news of our world, and the practical challenges and felt needs we daily face, and offer spiritual insight, practical wisdom and life modeling to help people live better.

Maybe that way they’ll earn the equity to point people to Jesus as the true fulfillment of this crazy, beautiful life, and then be able to invite them to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Thoughts/

Filed under: evangelism , evangelism, social media, social networking

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

The good news in 140 characters?

It’s amazing what we can pack into 140 characters on Twitter. But is that enough space for the Good News of Jesus?

I thought it might be fun to have some fun on a Tuesday afternoon to see if we could kick off a gospel meme that would fly around the Twitterverse in time for Easter.

Here’s mine:

The world sucks. Pain. Sickness. Death. We know we’re meant for more. Jesus will show you how much. He rescues anyone. Just ask. #goodnews

Be original. Be creative. Use the tag #goodnews. Give it your best.

Imagine the power of folks hearing the truth of Jesus simply by scanning their Twitter or status updates.

Post yours in the comments below.

Filed under: evangelism, social media , evangelism, social media, social networking, Twitter

Hey Jesus lovers, watch your mouth!

It might seem simplistic, but it seems to me that our only reason for living as Christians in this world is so we can evangelize our great God.

As someone who came to faith at the age of 30, I had personally experienced the cost of having my cognitive understanding of Christian faith junked up by all sorts of unhelpful rubbish.

That’s why I was always a little nonplussed by criticisms that NewSpring was somehow “dumbing down” or oversimplifying the gospel because it was seeker-sensitive. The Apostle Paul, for one, is amazingly clear about how everything we do in gathered worship should be seeker sensitive.

So I wasn’t expecting the conviction I felt after reading Internet Evangelism Today’s challenging post on the use of Christian jargon.

On the NewSpring Web Campus, we’re coaching our chat hosts not to use any Christian jargon so that if someone stumbles into the service, they’re not left scratching their heads.

And then in Sunday’s services i caught myself using the word “saved” several times in my segments as I explained that Pastor Perry Noble believed on faith — and was asking NewSpring to pray for — more than 1,000 people to come to know Jesus.

The core point of the article is that we have to assume that our hearers no nothing about Christianity or Jesus. That’s a fair bet in our post-Christian world.

And that seems even more important in the online world of YouTube, Twitter and other mass social media where accidental collisions between believers and unbelievers are an everyday reality.

Here’s a helpful starting list of words to avoid with alternatives. What would you add and why?

Filed under: evangelism , evangelism, social media