Seth Godin’s book “Meatball Sundae” talks about the fact that business models only tend to succeed when they are organized around the marketing channels available.
With the introduction of the Internet, the growth of social media and the decline of TV advertising and mass media the marketing landscape is changing.
The church as it exists today (I believe) is organized around a previous form of getting the word out (marketing). We congregate as a big group as that was the only way to get lots of people to hear about the bible and to engage with other Christians.
The Internet has changed all that.
I can listen to preaching in my car (free podcasts) and I spend more time engaging with people online.
Most of the people at church I can’t hold a solid conversation with because we are so different. So I hang out with the “young couples with kids” group that we have created within the church and I check to see what they have put on instagram during the service.
What if you didn’t try to just incorporate social media into the current church but made the entire church a way to get people to engage in social media?
What if the point of a sermon was to get people online tweeting or commenting and adding their thoughts or asking their questions? How would you preach differently?
What if we spent less time focusing on the “Sunday service” and more time creating a place online for people to connect and communicate.
Online you could provide:
– Video lessons for new Christians
– A way for amateur musicians to share their music with Christians and for people to find new worship music
– A place for people to interact
– A directory of ways to serve the community
The Sunday sermon would then exist to give people a reason to interact, rather than to get a message across.
Because let’s face it, people might not create the best interactions without some common thing to discuss.
Brochures would include links to websites and QR codes. Preaching would include live questions or comments from Twitter. New talent would surface more easily as people are given an online podium to talk to people.
The church might even become more empowered.
This could be a crazy idea, but it might take me 1,000 crazy ideas before I get a good one…so I’m just trying to get as many ideas as possible.
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