The App that Every Pastor Needs Right Now
First, a trivia: What’s the one app that has over 100 million daily active users, 10 billion daily views, White House participation, and a $3billion dollar purchase offer?
I bet a significant number of your congregation are a part of the 100 million active users and also contribute 2–3 hours of their week to the 10 billion daily views.
What app is this?
Yes, that app your teenagers and young adults check constantly. They even tap through snap stories as they ‘listen’ to real life conversations they are having with real people physically in front of them.
Most millennial lunches look like this:
Fork in one hand spinning spaghetti. iPhone in the other thumbing through snap stories. Blindly aiming for her mouth like a carnival dart game while her eyes lock in on 10 second snaps after snaps after snaps.
while her eyes lock in on 10 second snaps after snaps after snaps.
while her eyes lock in on 10 second snaps after snaps after snaps.
while her eyes lock in on 10 second snaps after snaps after snaps.
Do you get it yet?
The upcoming generation’s attention is locked in on Snapchat. While you’re preaching on a Sunday, their attention is focused on their friends’ latest snaps (or DJ Khaled’s). Even though they are physically sitting in front of you, their attention is on the screen. Even if your congregation paid attention to your 20-minute sermon, the effect of your sermon is temporary compared to the 10-second snaps that bombard their attention every day.
Truth is 10-seconds snaps bury your sermon to the memory basement.
And as the snaps pile up, they bury your sermon even deeper.
If our goal as pastors is to inspire and lead our congregation to deeper fellowship with God and His people, our role is to remind them to turn their attention toward God. Most Christians today turn their attention towards God only during Sunday services and mid-week gatherings.
Let’s break this down.
If there are 112 waking hours in a week (assuming you sleep 8 hrs a day), 1.5 hours are spent in Sunday worship services and 1.5 hours at mid-week gatherings. Only a 2.68% sliver of our congregation’s time is focused on our faith journey.
Jesus came to us and spoke to us in our language, as a human and we are called to imitate Him and speak to our congregation in their language, in this case, Snapchat.
If we turn our efforts towards where the people are paying attention, we can leverage this new technology and remind our congregation to take action on the convictions they felt on the previous Sunday. Pastors don’t need to make major changes to our lives to adopt Snapchat. During our sermon prep breaks, we can spend 15 minutes responding to our congregation’s snaps or give them little breadcrumbs to what this week’s sermon will be about.
With technology, we can do “visitations” and “lunches” with the younger generation remotely. We can now connect with more of our church in less time and effort than ever before.
So how do I use this thing? — I always turn towards experts to learn from them and this case is no different.
Gary Vaynerchuk, world-renowned social media expert has put together a simple and straight-forward guide on how to use Snapchat. Once there, scroll down to THE BASICS OF SNAPCHAT to learn from the best!
If you have any feedback, snap me 👻@jlkirbee or tweet me 🐦@jlkirbee.
I promise I’ll respond. 😊
I’ll be posting snaps on how I use technology to effectively pastor my church throughout the week in real time as I’m doing it. Add me to stay updated!
