Church-iberish

I've been following the series at Church Marketing Sucks on Lessons in Not Sucking. In the Common Communication Mistakes lesson they refer to "church-iberish" and refer to this Dunkin Donuts commercial.



I've used the word "church speak" before; I kind of like "church-iberish". I tend to notice it because I do worship visuals at our church and come across some good ones in hymns ("unction", anyone?).

I love the expressions on the customers' faces in this video. I can imagine them as visitors to our church and saying "My mind can't find these words".

I also do our church's web site. I came across an article about Church speak and mission statements at digital.leadnet.org. We've had several discussions about mission statements, and this article hits close to home for me.

I'm pondering what to do about our web site. I know I can (and should) do better, but it's one thing to recognize it, and another to deal with it from a church-wide viewpoint recognizing the needs of a visitor.

Oh Usher, There's a Cheetah in My Seat

Along the way in my discipleship journey I've come across lots of innovative things for ministry. This one boggles my mind.

Second Life is an online virtual world, where users can create digital versions of themselves and explore, participate, and basically live in a online universe.

As with many online worlds, some of the interaction can be, well, adult oriented, let's say, but some churches are making outreaches into this world as well.

LifeChurch.tv is a progressive church that connects many locations through satellite hookup, and hosts online church activities and worship experiences.

They're also entering the Second Life world with an virtual version of their church. People can attend the same worship that's being broadcast in the "real" world in Second Life.

Imagine being in a worship experience where the worshiper next to you is a Cheetah (see above).

According to the LifeChurch.tv website,

We developed "Experience Island" as an effort to share God's truth and love with the rapidly growing number of Second Life users. We desire to engage people right where they are (physically or virtually), and Second Life represents a new frontier in that effort. Because the Second Life environment uses avatars, people are able to remain relatively anonymous. We find that this creates a less-threating environment where people are much more willing to explore and discuss spiritual things.

I have to admit I'm both completely fascinated with this idea, and somewhat unsure about what this means for worship, especially in terms of human contact. This MSNBC article and video covers that angle as well.

I do think that we need to continually examine how we as Christians adapt to new cultures and new technologies. I'm still thinking I need at least some "real" church though.

I found an example of the Second Life church experience on YouTube, see for yourself:



By the way, a nod to TechnoPraxis for the original article that led me to some additional reading and surfing.

God, iPod, and Microsoft

I recently stumbled on this video parody of the Microsoft version of iPod. It is funny in its own right, and I've seen millions of "If Microsoft made..." kind of writings. When I viewed this one though, something struck a chord with me. Its the difference between simplicity, elegance, excellence, and "overdone".



This made me think of church outreach, evangelism, and of worship. We often talk about how the message itself is fundamental, but the means of communicating the message are changing and changeable.

But it certainly is possible to overdo the message and create a lot of distracting "noise" that diverts people away the fundamental message.

Maybe this is an offshoot of the KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid). Its easy to create fancy bells and whistles in our message and in our worship, but sometimes simplicity, elegance, and pure excellence is the most effective way.

Church Marketing - Seriously

In my previous post I noted a cartoon about church marketing. I also posted this to our church's forum, and the question of why this was so close to home came up. I've been doing some thinking about this, and here are some random observations.

Marketing? Can that be Christian?

Most people think of "marketing" in a secular sense, and it seems somehow foreign to church, in that trying too hard at marketing may be a "bad thing" and not Christian. But I think Paul was all about marketing. 1 Corinthians 9 comes to mind:

I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.
I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?
Run in such a way as to get the prize.

That sounds like "good marketing". Its the basis of the Great Commission too, isn't it?

So why do we Christians feel somehow "guilty" about good marketing?

Equipped?

There's a whole webiste and blog devoted to (bad) church marketing. This web site and the cartoon say a lot about equipping in our church. A marketing firm is full of trained, experienced marketing people. In church, we look for volunteers. Maybe the volunteers know how to do marketing; maybe they don't. I don't think its an issue of a church recruiting trained marketing people, its an issue of making sure the people who volunteer are properly trained and equipped.

Again, Paul is all over this - look at the next verse of the 1 Corinthians 9 passage mentioned above:

Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.

When we talk about "equipping disciples" in church, its easy to imagine "churchy" things, like Bible studies, etc. But equipping in areas like marketing, outreach (and technology) can be, and should be, just as important.

Time? I don't Have Time!

I recently stumbled across a post in Tony Morgan's blog describing an article in Men's Health about volunteering. I don't read Mens' Health, and I couldn't find any information on their web site, so I'm going on the data from Tony Morgan's post, but here are some figures:

• Women are more likely than men to volunteer.
• 32% of women serve in some volunteer capacity compared to 25% of men.
• Working mothers are the most active as volunteers.
• Busy people are more likely to volunteer.

The interesting one to me is the last one. I think this is some indicator of the old 80/20 rule, that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. So with the same people doing things, are we maximizing our resources?

And those 20% are already busy according to the survey. I know a common refrain heard around our church is "I'm so busy, I just don't have time!" I can hardly argue with that - balancing work and family is hard enough, let alone church. But is it easier sometimes to just say you don't have time for something rather than making a sacrifice for Christ?

I'm reminded of the "Cost of Following Jesus" passage in Luke 9. For the longest time I wondered how I would react if I was asked to leave everything behind to follow - I always imagined it as some "big moment"; but I came to understand that this applies to even the littlest things and in the smallest of moments, like making extra time to do something for discipleship. Discipleship ain't easy.


I don't mean for this to be any kind of slam on people doing marketing, especially in our church. I think we are trying, and are succeeding in areas. But I'd like to think there's always room for doing better.

Here are some interesting church web sites, for example, and some interesting uses of billboards.

Church Marketing

I recently came across this cartoon about church marketing (click on the cartoon to enlarge)

The cartoon is courtesy of Cartoon Church.com.

While I'm not sure its entirely accurate, I think there's probably some amount of truth to it ;-)

Tower of Video

Blogger just introduced a new featured called the Video Bar. It allows you to specify a search for video from Google Video and YouTube, and will show a small tower of video links which will play at the top of your blog when clicked.

I put this in my blog as an experiment - it searches for "Church Outreach" and "web2.0" - I'm got to see if this shows up anything interesting. Since I can't necessarily control what shows up from those searches I'll have to apologize in advance if something "bad" happens to show up.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

I recently came across this interesting illustration of web 2.0, from Professor Michael Wesch from the Kansas State Cultural Anthropology Department.

(full size version from YouTube is here)



Its one of the most powerful (and dizzying) explanations of the current state of the web. If you've been around the web for a while, its easy to stay stuck in the past, and think of static web sites that are controlled by others. This video shows that the power and content of both reading and publishing lie with all of its participants.

Two things come to mind when I think of church outreach

1) the possibilities of sheer numbers for outreached (his video has reached over 1.7 million viewers)
2) the opportunities to boost ministries through information sharing and collaboration.

I'm trying in my own way to help the cause at our church, through this blog, use of del.icio.us, flickr, and ways of consolidating feeds into manageable content. I'm finding that the more I read, the more I find, and the more I need to read.