Gather Your Online Congregation Now

Today I was talking to a friend, Jim Stovall, who teaches journalism at the University of Tennessee, and is a pioneer in developing and teaching web journalism.

In our conversation about how the internet is changing newspapers and journalism, Jim said, “I tell my students to start now, to become entrepreneur journalists, by using the internet to build an audience. Then, when they graduate, they’ll carry that audience with them wherever they work.”

Jim’s statement got me to thinking about churches and what seminary does to prepare you for ministry. While seminary does give students the opportunity to “try out” ministry through internships and “field work,” it usually ends there.

But, if Jim is right (and I know he is about journalism), why shouldn’t ministerial students begin to gather their congregations now, online?

Here’s what I believe an internet presence does for those preparing for vocational ministry:

1. Provides valuable experience in writing, editing, and communicating. Pastors are primarily in the communication business. Okay, business may not be a good description, but what we do is communicate — well or poorly — the Gospel. We preach, teach, counsel, pray, encourage, and lead — all of those actions are types of communication. Maintaining a consistent, quality web presence is good training for anyone, but especially for communicators.
2. Creates opportunities for handling both criticism and praise. Many of my conversations with pastors deal with pastors who have handled either criticism or praise inappropriately. Consistent bloggers learn to tone down the temptation to “flame” their critics, and also receive praise with humble restraint. Learning to handle both in real-life ministry situations is invaluable to successful ministry.
3. Helps sharpen your message. Jim also said that people go to specific websites to find information they cannot find anywhere else. When you’re thinking about your online message, ask yourself, “What am I trying to convey to my audience, and how is that different from what’s out there now?” Obviously, my niche is small churches and small church leaders. Narrowing your focus to families, singles, parents, youth, music, and so on, and becoming an authority in your field will help sharpen your ministry, and focus your energy.
4. Gathers your community. The big point is that now, before you graduate from seminary, take a church staff position, become a pastor, or plant a church, you can gather an online community. That community can help shape your ministry, and even lead to opportunities for ministry itself, such as a conference speaker, author, spiritual director, or consultant.

Of course, even those of us who are serving churches can enjoy the same benefits, and I have in the six years I have been writing Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor.

Both ministry and journalism are changing, and the internet is disrupting our notions of what a newspaper is, and what constitutes a congregation. We have never before lived in an age where anyone can have access to everyone. Not even Billy Graham, who has preached to more people in more countries than anyone in history had the opportunity for communication that we do today. Whether newspapers and ministers will seize this opportunity remains to be seen.

What do you think? Have you begun or expanded your ministry on the internet? And, if so, what does that look like? What are the criteria for an effective web ministry, in your opinion? Fire away in the comments. Thanks.

Taking our place on the digital stage

Tuesday I head to Knoxville to participate in an unusual event for a Baptist preacher.  I’ll be a roundtable discussion leader at A Public Conversation on Web Journalism.  Other speakers include local newspaper editors, executives from the media giant Scripps (HGTV, Food Network, etc), and other online creators of advertising, and journalism sites.

How did I get involved?  My friend and University of Tennessee professor, Jim Stovall, asked me to talk to students about this blog and the other sites I edit, SmallChurchPROF.com and NewChurchReport.com.  The student radio station has already scheduled an interview with me, and I’ll speak to a large journalism class on Thursday afternoon.

As part of this meeting, we’re also rolling out krayo.com, an independent news site that will be written by college and university journalism students and invited guest authors.  Krayo.com is up now, but with content that Jim and I created.  Eventually, the entire site will feature student writing, photographs, and videos.

Jeffrey Arnett’s book, Emerging Adulthood, pointed out that while 79% of emerging adults believe in a higher power guiding their lives, only 25% think attending religious services is Very Important or Quite Important; 42% said Not Important at all.

In other words, if we’re going to have a faith conversation with young, emerging adults, we are not going to have it within the church because young adults are not there.  Dan Kimball and Dave Kinnaman told us that in their books, too.

So, we’re taking the faith and culture conversation to the campus, asking students to write faith-and-culture news for their peers.  Should be an interesting experience, and I’m looking forward to what I’m going to learn from the students.

Church needs to do more of this — take the conversation where people really work and live.  And, the conversation can’t be all about us, it has to be a real conversation.  Krayo.com will be an open forum for talking to one another about faith issues of all kinds, even unpopular ones including issues involving spiritualities other than Christian.

We who follow Jesus must take our place on the digital stage with others who feel just as passionately about their faith, or lack of it, as we do about ours.  Our ideas, our theologies, and our Christian points of view, must be able to hold their own in the online conversation.  If we’re afraid of that, then we have already lost our place in the public forum of ideas.

I’ll let you know how it goes.  I’ll be twittering and posting from the event, so stay tuned.  What do you think of this project?  What concerns do you have?  Let me hear from you because I value your input.  Thanks.

What Would Google Do? author quotes me

Jeff Jarvis, journalism guru and author of What Would Google Do? quoted from my post The Future of Churches: A Network of Niches.  Needless to say, I’m honored and thrilled.

Jarvis is one of the prophetic voices who warned of the decline of newspapers when everyone else was in denial.  His book, WWGD?, looks at culture through the best practices of “the google,” as one former president used to say.

Jarvis is primarily interested in how the new economy (read: digital age) is changing journalism, but extends his argument into the business world, and even the church world in this post, What Would God Do? Makes for interesting reading and translation of one concept into the domain of faith, which I think is valid.  After all, churches are part of the culture, too.

Dying newspapers, dying churches

Newspapers must either change or die in this new media age, and churches could learn something from them.

My friend, Jim Stovall, teaches journalism at the University of Tennessee, and sees the death of newspapers as a positive development for journalism.  Does that sound strange?  Jim sees it this way:

We who contemplate the importance of journalism look at the future with trepidation.

What happens to journalism, we ask, when newspapers continue on their inevitable decline? The question assumes that journalism itself will be diminished.

I am coming to a different conclusion: 

Journalism will improve once newspapers die or decline to a minor medium.

Jim and I have had several conversations about newspapers and churches.  We both grew up in church, and Jim is a regular United Methodist Church member.  I share Jim’s conviction about newspapers, and have a conviction of my own about churches.

Newspapers need to realize they are in the news business, not the paper business. The high cost of printing, delivery, labor, and organization is bankrupting newspapers.  News organizations that embrace new media are on the rise.  Where do you read your news — a printed paper or online?  And that’s my point.

Churches have a similar problem.  We are trying to hold on to the form of church (our version of the “paper”), forgetting that the message (“news”) is most important.  Almost all denominations are in decline now, including my own Southern Baptist Convention.  In response to that, denominational leaders try to appeal to young people.  LifeWay conducts lots of very good research on how Baptists can reach the under-30 crowd.  We kid ourselves to think, “If we could only add young people to our churches, everything would be fine.”

What we really should be doing is repackaging the message in ways that would carry it better.  For example:  Pick the worst hour of the week to try to get young people to an event and you won’t find one worse than 11 AM on Sunday morning, unless it’s 10 AM on Sunday morning.  Yet we persist in meeting at that time, which started when the farm chores had to be done, the wagon hitched up, and Sunday lunch packed for dinner-on-the-grounds before the family could leave for church.

I could go on and on here about our concern for the “form” of church more than its substance, but I’ll let you fill in your own ideas.  My point, as was Jim’s about newspapers, is that the sooner some of the outmoded forms of church fail or diminish, the sooner we’ll get on with finding new forms for the message.   Of course, that might mean some of the churches we currently pastor go out of business, which would hurt.  But if we remember that the form of church we have now is not that different than it was in the 1920s, then we realize we’re overdue for a makeover. Not much else from the 1920s survives today, and churches and newspapers are about to get added to that list.

What do you think? If you’d like to read the rest of what my friend says about newspapers and the future he sees for journalism, go here. Then think about what a similar outcome might mean for churches.  Let me know what you discover.