Options

by Eddie Pipkin

I had mentioned in other blog entries in the past few weeks that NBC had noted significant gains in viewer engagement for their Olympics coverage this year. This good news for the network followed the debacle of viewership non-interest during the previous, pandemic delayed games three years ago. The massive surge in this year’s ratings was credited by analysts to a revised approach to storytelling (cue Snoop Dogg) AND a full-hearted embrace of the powers of streaming. This summer there were more options than ever before for getting your sports fix, and this is increasingly true not just for the Olympics but for sports across the board. Meanwhile, local churches keep on doing the same old thing, offering the same limited options for engagement, and wondering why their ‘ratings’ stay stuck in neutral.

I didn’t want to throw all you local churches under the proverbial bus without at least checking to see if I was full of hot air, so I went web surfing to a bunch of local church sites to see what I could see (web surfing local church sites being pretty much how any neighborhood newbie would figure out what you had to offer).

A lot of you are offering Sunday worship! And a lot of you are populated by generically diverse, often young, happy and fashionably dressed people! Or at least we all seem to be shopping from the same photography sources for our web design.

Extra points for any local church whose web presence actually includes real photos of real people engaged in real fellowship and ministry (pictures of buildings don’t count for points, although I think they are useful to give people a perspective of place, used judiciously).

There are lots and lots of generic descriptions of Sunday School Classes (!) and small groups. If you surf from local church website to local church website, these descriptions all start to blend together in one big morass of positive adjectives and life-affirming catch phrases. There’s a lot of blahbety-blah-blah going on. It is the rarest of paragraphs that gives specific insights into the character, purpose, and individual features that set one gathering apart from any other.

Please, please feel free to defend yourself from these charges in the comments section. If your ministry does a great job of capturing its unique personality in its online and social media presence, how do you do it? (Some ways we have written about doing it include testimonials and stories from real people, thoughtful explanations of exactly what a ministry does that distinguishes it from any other ministry, useful practical info for those looking to grow and connect, and lots and lots of pictures and video.)

Back to the changing sports broadcast landscape, we are seeing increasing options for customizing viewership. With streaming technology, it’s possible to offer dozens of differently packaged versions of the same event. The Olympics offered an extremely popular feature called the “Gold Zone,” which provided a live feed (actually, multiple live feeds shown by a split screen) of pivotal moments of different events throughout the day. It’s the same approach pioneered by the NFL with its “RedZone” channel, a continuous Sunday broadcast that jumps from exciting game moment to exciting game moment. Beyond the visceral excitement of the Gold Zone approach, NBC fully embraced both traditional network broadcasts (live and edited for a prime-time presentation) and the vast multitude of streaming possibilities. You could go to their Peacock streaming platform base and pick individual events to watch; you could select packaged summaries or feel-good human interest stories; or you could even select comic commentaries on the day’s events. Chop it up and serve it up however you choose to enjoy it. That’s increasingly how people are accustomed to interacting with the world, and you can make a strong case that church participation has a role to play in giving people an alternative to that approach – the deep dive that builds soul and character versus the shallow-attentioned click-click-click to the next thing – but you can also make a case that those two things are not mutually exclusive. One can be a pathway to the other. Or a shorthand for staying connected to the thing that’s not our particular deep dive destination.

First of all, you have content that you have worked tirelessly to offer for the enrichment of souls. Package it and offer it as many ways as you and your team can think to share it. People have preferences for how they want to interact with that content; there is no biblical imperative to present it in one format only. As an example, your pastor has crafted an inspirational sermon, a very powerful message. Ask yourself, how many ways will you give people to interact with that powerful message? One? (Being there in person.) Two? (Being there in person or watching the online recording.) Three? (Being there in person, watching the recording, or seeing snippets of the sermon and thoughtful reflection questions about the message on social media.) Four? Five? How far can you and your team take that exercise?

Effective discipleship continues to be the greatest challenge for many local churches. So many of us are still wed to the classic construct for “classes.” And they are not always even well-facilitated classes.

Discipleship poses the richest potential field for giving people customizable options for how they will learn to be followers of Christ, and our imaginations for the possibilities continue to be stunted. In many of our local churches, there is no longer even schedule flexibility to pursue solid discipleship training – in many local churches, there is no longer even a Zoom option for joining a study or small group experience remotely. It’s be there Sunday morning or Tuesday night at 7:00, or you’re out of luck.

It is rare to find a local church that even suggests a discipleship reading list or independent study program for those who want to go deeper on their own or in a guided process that’s not a standard small group get-together or class.

In fact, I have some homework for you. If you have a discipleship reading program at your local church, share with us what’s on it and how it works. Or if you were building a library or list of discipleship reading (if, for example, someone were to ask you for basic recommendations on what they should read to learn more about living like Christ), what are your top five recommendations?

Obviously, our ultimate goal is to get people into communities of fellow souls that hold one another accountable and encourage one another to grow, but there can be multiple pathways for how to get there. And our lives have different seasons where different options for our discipleship journey can be useful if we need to take a break from the standard model. I did see one awesome web page, populated by a stock photo of young, diverse, energized and interested looking stock photo people, called “the Center for Creative Discipleship,” and I got a little delirious with anticipation! But the type below the headline read, “Under construction. Check back for future exciting developments.”

Ain’t it the truth?

What are your thoughts? Do you have exciting discipleship stories to tell? Are you and your team breaking new and inventive ground? Are you giving people lots of options to engage with your spiritual growth content? Is this whole blog hogwash, and everything’s cruising along just fine? Only the comments section knows.

*An Asterisk: I should note in all fairness that surfing local churches on the web and social media sites is not exclusively a depressing travelogue. It’s the purpose of the blog to cajole and stimulate dialogue, but there are inspiring bright spots to be found. Bless the churches with new ministries built around getting people on outside field trips. Bless the ministries with inventive options for relational service. Bless the pastors who are doing short sermon previews and incisive sermon recaps on their social feeds. Bless the websites with clear and easy pathways for asking questions of a real person. And bless those who continue to do the hard work of social media interaction with fun and provocative participatory prompts, not just announcement after announcement.