1 Chronicles 12:32 said that these were the people who were responsible for both understanding the times and knowing what to do.

Today, like most days, I came across an interesting story several times in my social stream. A Church is suing a woman who has posted negative reviews on several review sites about the church as well as start a blog sharing her story of discontent with how that church has handled some issues. Now, I don’t know the whole story here and I leave it up to the courts to figure that out but I can comment on the perception that the public now has of this church and the woman.

Clearly the church in question, and the leaders of it, just don’t get it. We live in a completely different culture now that new media has become pervasive. The problem is that most church leaders think culture is the same PLUS we have new media and that is where we are failing right now not just at Beaverton Grace Bible Church; whose biggest offense might be the over use of papyrus.

We cannot go about communicating and connecting with people, both inside and outside our churches, the same way we did EVEN 5 years ago. We have turned the corner and new media has gone from being a thing that was simply a new tool to something that has forever changed our culture right down to our very core of how we empathize with our fellow man.

What this means on the ground for you as a leader in a church:

Think new media first
Don’t do your normal vision and strategy thing and then look to new media as a secondary tool or channel. New media must be a part of your thinking from moment one just like it is part of culture continually. Better yet, use new media in real time to work through your strategy it will make your church that much more transparent.

Be Transparent…now
Transparency is everything in new media space, and that just may be the scariest thing to baby boomer leaders who are used to having tightly controlled channels of communication and an audience at the ready. Millenials need you to be transparent because they don’t trust leaders, and for good reason. This means the conversation must continually be two way.

Make noise
If you truly have a vibrant community at your church and they are connected in new media sharing stories, then the positive should out weigh the negative. In a new media world there is always going to be a negative review, especially for a church, but you have to rise above that and celebrate the beautiful stories in a public way. If your organization is truly toxic there will be know hiding it, I can’t help you there.

If you manage, or know someone who, manages a church website we would love to share the data with you. Just pop open your analytics and fill out this form and we’ll send everyone that contributes data the results.

Clay Shirky, in his book Here Comes Everybody, says:

“Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring….It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen…”

I would like to think that, at the early adopter level, we have gotten to this point but there are still enough ‘early adopters’ out there still making so much noise about ‘Social Media’ itself that we are stunting the growth of the top part of the bell curve. If we are going to pull culture along and lead them to the place that we have all discovered, which is the position of ubiquity that new media has in our live’s as early adopters, we need to act like it is pervasive and ubiquitous so that it truly becomes so.

Every time we do another blog post on 101 level social media ideas and strategy we stunt the growth of people who might otherwise be much farther down the road. Every time we try to convince our teams to adopt more social channels we turn them off and keep them out of the game. Every time we do another seminar on social media we slow down progress.

So stop talking about social media and just let it become the norm.

In my conversations about it I realize that way too many people have no idea what SXSWi is all about. When I say SXSW half the people think of the music festival that happens right after interactive. The other half think that it is a technology and development conference for uber geeks.

SXSWi is actually a conference on culture and where culture is going. Since technology it what makes culture change than it naturally is at the forefront of the conversation at SXSWi. If understanding culture and where culture is headed is important to you and your career you need to think about attending SXSWi.

Some of the sessions I attended:

The View From Inside Rainn Wilson’s Brainstem

This was the highlight for me since it was right in my wheelhouse; spirituality on the internet. You may or may not know that Rain Wilson launched Soul Pancake, an online community that discusses the ‘big questions’, in March of 2009. I signed up for the beta back then because I was really interested in spirituality and the internet.

Notable notes

The web isn't about clicks and views and enslavement. Rather it brings us together to a place where we are not alone. #sxrainn @rainnwilson

March 10, 2012 11:51 PM via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@aaron_j_patton

Aaron J. Patton

"AOL still makes a lot of money off of old people who still pay for email" #sxrainn #sxswi

March 10, 2012 11:15 PM via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@m_vince

Vince Marotte

Don't ask what the world needs. Find what makes you come alive and do that. The world needs more people to come alive. #sxrainn #swsw

March 10, 2012 11:58 PM via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@sabialea

Sabia Siddiqi

#SXRainn #soulpancake #SXSW It's a spiritual act to post a beautiful photo on Instagram ... to watch Arcade Fire, to try and bring justice

March 10, 2012 11:54 PM via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@StarTGIF

ElizabethKieszkowski

Digital Debouchery With Anthony Bourdain

I’ve said it before, Anthony Bourdain has my dream job. I’m not saying that lightly, I really believe he has the best job in the world. So it goes without saying that this was the session I was most looking forward to. As a content creator first and foremost I think the No Reservations is creating some of the best content out there today. The session was a look at some of their creative processes and team dynamics as well as some insight on their use of new media. Since this is an all ages blog I’ll keep it clean with some of the notable notes:

"The whole world is changing, the whole dynamics of tv is changing! That´s what we´re preparing for!" Tony Bourdain at #sxsw #sxBourdain

March 13, 2012 9:30 PM via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@ninanord

Nina Alida Nordbø

“@JanelleNowak: Yet another confirmation TV is dying. "We want our tv shows to feel like the movies." #SXBOURDAIN”

March 13, 2012 9:13 PM via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@m_vince

Vince Marotte

I don't care how many ppl watch my show when it first airs,I care about how many ppl watch it aft 2 yrs. #SXBourdain

March 13, 2012 8:52 PM via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@RandyElrod

Randy Elrod

Some of the brilliant minds I connected with at re:create thought it would be a good idea to do a blog to blog book review/conversation on Cognitive Surplus. I like the book so much I’m always down for reading it again. I’m currently re-reading Here Comes Everybody, also by Clay Shirky, so it’s fitting to dig into Cognitive Surplus again.

Head over to the blogs of the others involved (Adam Herod, Amanda Sims, Chris Branscome, David Ballard) and get yourself a copy of the book and start digging in. Next week one of us will post the first post on the first chapter and then we’ll see what happens.

What the film doesn’t touch on is why this happened.

Why, after 20 years, did this film get resurrected and amass a huge following on the order of the Rocky Horror Picture Show? Why was a film that didn’t even go straight to DVD (VHS rather) because it was so bad it premiered on HBO late night now selling out theaters as fans gathered en mass dressed as characters from the film?

The answer is…social media. Several times through the film fans express feelings to the effect of; “I thought me and my close friends were the only ones that even had a VHS tape of Troll 2″.

What changed with social media was the ability to find other fans of Troll 2 on a scale much larger than that which you could gather in your living room. Troll 2 fans across the nation quickly started to discover in 2007 (as Facebook and Twitter started to rise) that there were people just like them all over the country.

The studios and theaters that previously had total control over what movies were going to become popular were removed from the equation as the users themselves reached into the trash and pulled Troll 2 out to celebrate the beauty and virtue in a movie that is so bad that it is in fact brilliant.

We can take away a few really good lessons from the Troll 2 case study:

Shelf life matters

At the time that Troll 2 was finished it was clear that it didn’t fit into the business models that the studios and theaters had at the time. It’s not even about the quality of the film of which there is no doubt it is quite low; many terrible movies made it to theaters in 1990 not the least of which were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Kindergarten Cop. When the vehicle of content distribution is determined by the demand of the users rather than the force and ideals of the institutions that control the content there is no telling when and how the content will be received.

This is scary for studios who are used to market research and history telling them with almost pinpoint accuracy how much a film is really worth in the marketplace. This is promising for artists who simply want to make films that move people in other ways beyond the box office. Even if the movement is laughing at the film and not with it.

Group formation works best when institutions get out of the way

The Troll 2 movement, as it were, could not have been orchestrated by a centralized institution if not for the simple reason it would be too costly. The first thing an organization has to think about is cost and efficiency and one look at Troll 2 (in Hollywood market terms) one would quickly determine that the film isn’t worth the silver oxide it is developed on let alone the money and energy it would cost to try and get thousands of people excited about it.

This is also scary for institutions that hire and pay people to organize groups. Powerful group formation is happening all around us without expert driven organizations in things like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. This is de-valuing those institution’s channels to form groups, even if just slightly, to a point where many are struggling to maintain a large enough following to maintain their infrastructure. We’re seeing this in the church in America in a big way.

These kinds of stories have me excited and if nothing else you should watch Best Worst Movie; it’s a well done documentary that will make you laugh and maybe make you shed a tear.

The sermon…it’s come quite far since Jesus stood on the ‘mount’ and delivered a timeless message. I believe the current format in which we execute a ‘sermon’ is fairly well broken. The job a pastor hires a sermon to perform in 2012 is the same as in 1912 or 1812 yet the sermon format is having less and less effect on culture. Jesus could more or less start a riot with an eight minute illustration yet the average pastor can’t get 100 people to change their behavior after 40 minutes of multi-media supported exposition.

Maybe 40 minutes isn’t long enough? Earlier this month my ‘sermon’ at Gateway Church was a week long! Let me break it down for you.

Thursday | Setup up the Weekend

On Thursday I posted on the Gateway Church Facebook page the following post:

It’s not a life changing post, make no mistake, but something about it made it engaging. In fact, it was the most reacted to post for all of 2011 on our Facebook page. What the post did was plant the idea that Sunday was coming in their minds and allowed Sunday to start for them right then and there.

The Thursday Facebook post is a great opportunity to warm people up to the content that will be delivered on Sunday. This can be a challenging question or in this case a curious photo that actually got people talking. There was even some people upset about the photo, as you’ll see in the comments, so maybe we were doing something right. In the future I’m going to use a video specifically for the Thursday post.

We find that Friday and Saturday are fairly dead on our social networks so we don’t do a whole lot in the way of strategic interaction those days.

Sunday | Delivery

On Sunday Bruce Gilson and I did something we had been talking about for a few months, we taught the message together and at one point we were on stage at the same time. This is more or less an aside and something I’ll get into later as we learn more about the potential there. Back to the delivery; During one section of the teaching I intentionally focused on delivering, for about 4 minutes, a story that could stand alone and be cut from the message and served as a stand alone video on the web.

This is a big departure from how I was taught to teach in homiletics class in college where we were told to teach in an arc with everything tied together. The segment I focused on definitely served the arc of the day, don’t get me wrong, but it forced me to consider those who might watch the clip days (or even years) later rather than the few thousand people that were in the room that day.

Monday | Follow Up

On Monday via our social network outposts (here’s one thread from one of our campuses) we asked a follow up question to the action point I closed the Sunday message with. This gave our community the chance to revisit the teaching and connect with each other as they shared their story of how they executed the ask from Sunday during their day.

Tuesday | Revist

Tuesday is really simple, we post the video of the entire message. You should be doing this every week (audio if that’s what you got) regardless of strategy.

Wednesday | Share

On Wednesday we post the stand alone little nugget from the teaching. This is the part I delivered with the intent that it would be a short clip that needed to provide virtue in and of itself on the web. This is the clip we wanted people to share on their own social channels because it is very portable and easy for someone to tune into. In fact, I delivered the content while doing the best I could to disconnect people from the fact that this was happening in a church if only for that moment. This allows people of all paradigms to glean something from the content. Truth be told their are people that as soon as they see it is a pastor teaching in a church they dismiss the content.

This is also late enough in the week that it may encourage someone seeing this on the feeds of people in our community to take a second look at Gateway Church and maybe engage with us on Sunday at one of our campuses.

Your team should be doing this now…like this week. If you are at a small church and as the teacher you probably have direct access to the channels needed to pull this off. If you are at a larger church it may take a lot more coordination to execute the week long sermon but from our experience it is worth it, especially as Sunday is losing value and we look to new ways to engage as a church community.

Last year I discovered Top Gear on the BBC while perusing Netflix for something to watch. I’m not that into cars; after all I drive a Kia. But I was quickly drawn into the show. The format was refreshing. The personalities were magnetic and so was their chemistry. The dialogue was witty and the overall quality of the content was phenomenal. It also captivated me because in 2009 we piloted a similar format for 4 weeks at Gateway Church as we explored what it would take to do church on the internet. So my immediate reaction to seeing an episode of Top Gear was: this is the future of church! A short time later I realized that Top Gear was garnering 350 million viewers weekly with 300 million more watching later via the web making it essentially the most watched english speaking television program in the world at more than half a billion viewers.

What Top Gear does right

Top Gear Has Multiple Personalities

Top Gear has three hosts, which is to say they don’t have a host and then ‘co-hosts’. This is different than what we’re used to on information based TV and clearly different than what we are used to in Church. We are accustomed to a lead personality that is supported by others to fill in the gaps where needed but mainly to serve the voice of the lead personality. Having three unique personalities allows the creative team of Top Gear to put the right personality into the right segment without the audience feeling like this is a pinch hitter and thus check out. Each personality has equal equity with the audience and can carry a segment alone or with one or more of the others without a hitch.

We have a teaching team at Gateway Church and it is starting to really pick up some steam in terms of what we are capable of creatively. A couple years ago we stopped posting who would be teaching on Sunday on the website because we wanted to communicate that the Sunday experience was a quality experience that superseded who was delivering the teaching segment.

The future of church is multiple personalities rather than the alpha male model we have seen the last 100 years.

Top Gear is a Segmented Experience

A Top Gear episode generally consists of several non-linear and un-related segments that can stand on their own or serve a greater story by tying together with the other segments. You may have a segment live in the studio and then cut to a short film on a particular car that was produced earlier and then move to a live interview in the studio. The beauty is that all of those ‘bits’ can stand alone. If all you ever saw was the short 7 minute film on a Mercedes, the story therein would be complete and not lacking for not experiencing what was before or after.

What we do in Church on Sunday morning is deliver an hour or longer experience that has pieces stacked together that are dependent on each other to tell a bigger story and deliver a ‘take-away’ to those present. The music, the drama, the short film or the movie clip are designed to support a bigger arc more or less fall flat if it was the only bit one experienced. This makes it difficult for the experience to live on beyond Sunday morning which is or paramount importance in our new media culture.

The future of church is a segmented non-linear experience.

Top Gear is Shareable

For something to be shareable it needs two components; portability and broad appeal. Top Gear obviously has broad appeal as it is the most watched English speaking show on the planet but why does a car show have such broad appeal? I can only speak for myself on this one but my guess is I’m not alone; I don’t really care that much or know that much about cars so it’s safe to say that the topic in and of itself is not that interesting to me (and others). The creative people at Top Gear have managed to make a show that is essentially about something that most people aren’t that interested in and made it remarkable.

I can see it in people’s faces when I tell them about this show they have not seen. When I mention it’s a car show they immediately tune out and I have to begin the hard sell. Sound familiar (think inviting someone to church)? Top Gear seems to stop at nothing to achieve quality and they make no apologies to automotive purists for their style that creates such broad appeal. It is very clear the the hosts know A LOT about cars, but they don’t speak in high level expert terms, they instead make it reachable for people like me who know very little.

Top Gear is also portable because of the nature of the segmented experience. If I were to share a 40 minute video on my Facebook or Twitter feed the amount of people who would watch the whole thing would be small and in turn the amount of people who share it based on that would be smaller yet. But a 5 minute high quality short film on a something remarkable like an amazing car or something related to driving stands a much greater chance of being shared and consumed on social networks.

The future of church is compact shareable content.

Top Gear Has Shelf Life

I can watch an episode or a segment of Top Gear that is 5 years old or one that premiered last week and very little, almost none, of the content is lost due to time lapse. The writing and creative elements of Top Gear are not dependent on current events to deliver virtue to the user.

How often does the content delivered on a Sunday morning, especially during the teaching/preaching segment, depend on current events; not to mention references to local realities alienating people not living in proximity to the church? This is probably the lowest hanging fruit on this tree that your church team can grab onto and adapt to this weekend’s service.

The future of church is content that has indefinite shelf life on the web.

Top Gear Runs in Seasons

Top Gear doesn’t air every week of the year. Like most TV shows it runs during seasons, in this case in the fall and in the spring. This is not to say that the team at Top Gear takes the rest of the year off; it’s a full time gig creating content of this quality. Top Gear does augment throughout the year in social space with teasers and specials.

This is going to be the biggest turn for the church but I believe it is the future. If the experience is good enough and has shelf life and shareability running for only a couple of seasons would be a viable model for a church. This would need to be augmented with hyper local community gatherings, serving/community projects and other relational experiences throughout the year. Imagine a church the was built on a foundation of relationships rather than a shared consumption experience? The biggest hurdle your team faces is that Sunday happens every seven days and that greatly reduces the quality and impact of your content.

The future of church is running the time and place gathering in seasons.

Can this be done?

I really believe this is the future of church and I also think we can take steps in this direction now. You can build your Sunday experience now with multiple personalities, segmentation, shareability and shelf life without fracturing what it is you already do. The concept of seasons will take a pretty big paradigm shift for just about every church…but I think it’s the future none the less.