miletwo::network

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we (the church) differentiate ourselves from the church of old and the world that has been pulled over our eyes, especially in this postmodern day and age. There’s quite a bit of interesting and controversial data on the topic that is certainly relevant to our church marketing efforts. As I always say, you have to know the audience before you can speak to them.

So what do Christians expect online?

The first thing I was mildly surprised to find was that more people use Christian media than attend church. According to my buddy George (okay, I don’t really know him, but his firm is brilliant):

The Internet is the only mass medium … whose audience share has grown during the past decade. The proportion of the population using the Internet for faith purposes has increased by two-thirds since 1998.

– Barna Research, March 14, 2005

That tells me that the days of our reliance solely on brick and mortar communication techniques are gone. If we’re going to meet the needs of the today’s online faithful, we’re going to have to be savvy about how we do it.

The following comes from Faith Online: Pew Internet & American Life project published April 7th, 2004 (http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Faith_Online_2004.pdf)

• The United States has approximately 128 million Internet users
• 64% of the nation’s 128 million Internet users have done things online that relate to religious or spiritual matters.
• Nearly two-thirds of the adults who use the Internet in the United States have used the Internet for faith-related matters. That represents nearly 82 million Americans.

Among the most popular and important spiritually related online activities:

• 38% of the 128 million Internet users have sent and received email with spiritual content.
• 35% have sent or received online greeting cards related to religious holidays.
• 32% have gone online to read news accounts of religious events and affairs.
• 21% have sought information about how to celebrate religious holidays.
• 17% have looked for information about where they could attend religious services.
• Some 28% of the online faithful said they had used the Internet to seek or exchange information about their own religious faith or tradition with others
• 26% said they had used the Internet to seek or exchange information about the religious faiths or traditions of others
• Most said they do it out of curiosity

I think I’ve been saying this pretty clearly for a while now. The internet is not going away, our members are going online and too often are getting lost on their way. We are much more likely to hold their attention and attract new believers if we meet their need for online social communication, information, and interaction.

What can we do then?

Here are a few suggestions for how to connect with your online congregation

• Create a church or personal Facebook or MySpace account — It’s a great way to get an interesting perspective on who they relate to, how they relate, what they’re saying and what their interests are. It’s like doing a survey of all the nitty-gritty details of their lives without asking a single question! You can tell a lot about a person by why their friends are.
• Start Blogging — You’d be surprised how much information you have to share that your members will be interested in. Got a deep theological question to ask? Post it on your blog and see how many comments you’ll get. Again, surveys in the bulletin might get annoying if you do them every week, but more than enough people will visit your blog and give you a piece of their mind every single time you post to the blogosphere. Be aware though, this requires some moderation to keep spammers away so it’s best to have a team to help you keep it under control, or be sure you involve the tech savvy to implement safeguards to keep the spammers at bay.
• Twitter – I personally haven’t figured out what this is all about, but twitter is ablaze like wildfire, especially among youthful participants. It’s a way to keep up to speed on what’s happening in a persons life via the “tweets” they post about their day to day goings on. These quick “what I’m doing” posts are only 140 characters long but it’s an interesting way to keep your follwers up to date on what you’re doing. You can even post your tweets via SMS (that’s cell phone lingo for you old folks). My twitter is at http://twitter.com/m2net if you’re interested. A great example of a pastor friend that’s using is http://betterthanblank.org and his twitter is http://twitter.com/betterthanblank.
• Engage them socially — I know, I know… it’s crazy talk, but when was the last time you had dinner with that new 20 something black hair and eyeliner couple that just started coming to your church? You might be surprised at what you can learn from the people who happen into your space, especially new people. Get to know what drives them and you’ll learn a lot about the culture around you.
• Start a mentoring program — By the same token as the engaging above, get the more mature members of your leadership team involved in the same process of mentoring the younger generation and then meet together regularly to talk about what you’re learning from them. It might just change your world.

That’s all I have for today. Above any other suggestion, keep praying that God will show you how to be intelligent and care-full (full of caring) about your members and the community around you. Let him guide you in ways that might scare you when it comes to reaching out and engaging the community around you.

Grace-out,

Jeremy