Going Digital with Style
With a global pandemic and the near complete obliteration of in-person gatherings of any kind, churches, schools, conferences, meetings and workplaces have had to swiftly move into a digital-first mindset. As the Director of Innovation at OneHope, I have spent a lot of time thinking about and working to make digital missions a priority and I want to share 5 lessons that will help you enter this space with style.
Lesson 1: Relationship > Access
Digital tools give us access to almost everyone in the world. WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and others yet to be invented are incredible tools. But we must avoid the misconception that access is the same as influence.
Influence is earned through trust in relationship. Relationship does not scale with access. Building relationships takes time and intentionality, more so even than in-person. As you work to build programs, be sure to include the space for relationships to form. That the partners you work with are equipped to do a different kind of ministry than before.
At the most recent Youth Ministry and Children’s Ministry Roundtable events, I had the chance to hear from many of the leading pastors in the U.S., and I heard how treating youth ministry like a series of events to attract youth with fairly shallow relationships has really hurt them. As these pastors have been forced to go digital first, they have found that individual relationship as a foundation leads to much more significant ministry, that they have been able to return to being pastors instead of event planners. We know church is the people, not the building, but COVID-19 has forced us to really live that out in ways we took for granted.
Lesson 2: Capacity > Money
Ministries are suffering from a major drop in financial giving. The global economy is in turmoil, unemployment is on the rise as many industries are affected by social distancing and government stay-at-home orders. I would argue that we have become too dependent on dollar bills as the primary capacity we ask people to invest in our ministries. Through my work with Indigitous, I have seen people willing to invest their time, expertise and skills, all worth far and above more than they could contribute from their bank account. Even if an organization had received the money to hire a contractor to do the same job, there is an unaccounted for value in having someone who really wants to do the work and sees it as a missional contribution.
The problem is that we are not in the habit of involving “outsiders” in our work. A few objections I hear are that their contributions are potentially not of high quality, that volunteer time commitments are hard to manage, and that “it’s just easier” to pay a professional. In my experience I have not seen those hold up. In the times when I have invited outsiders in who I have built a relationship with, communicated clear expectations to, and who believe in the mission and vision of the project and want to help, I have seen them go far above and beyond what any contractor would do. I have also had terrible experiences with contractors who are often merely “doing a job.”
As we enter times of financial hardship, I would encourage you and your teams to start practicing inviting partnership in terms of capacity and collaboration rather than a purely financial arrangement, and see if we can’t actually do more than we could have had we been reliant on funding. One paid and practiced volunteer recruiter and manager could be worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in work product and missional kingdom impact.
Lesson 3: Service > Product
OneHope has a strong legacy in printed products. We contextualize God’s word and distribute it to children and youth through local churches. As we enter this new space of digital first, I want to caution our teams to leave the product mindset behind, and move forward with a service mindset.
If you write a book, it gets printed and put on a shelf and you are done. On to the next. If you publish an app or website, it is much more like opening a restaurant where there is a chef cooking food, waiters, and a host to greet you at the door. You can’t have a restaurant without food anymore than you can have a digital presence without being present. People expect there to be a level of service and support behind it. People will assume that you want to talk to them, that you will answer their questions, that you are listening and present.
We must be intentional about creating new capacities to have this presence and meeting these expectations because otherwise, the message we communicate through our justifiable preoccupation with other thing work or the next project is that we do not care about them, that we do not take what we are talking about seriously, and that our digital experience is of low quality, inactive and probably dead. The same thoughts you would have if you walked into an empty, dark restaurant.
To create this capacity, we must again practice inviting in “outsiders” of church partners, youth leaders, pastors, passionate christians to co-own this work with us. Giving them the opportunity to be a part of work we are doing is really exciting for them, Sharing ownership and responsibility is both honoring to them, and necessary for us to succeed.
Lesson 4: Model > Technology
We spend a great amount of time talking about how technology should be designed to solve specific problems we see. Things like better communication, increased collaboration, networking and sharing of ideas, resources and strengthen relationships. At OneHope, we use the term “durable networks” to mean relationships that last and mutually benefit everyone involved.
If you have a bad model, then adding digital to the problem just means you have a bad digital model.
I would argue that every goal we have for our networks, relationships, communication, gaining influence and sharing relevant resources can be solved without a massive technology investment. If you can develop a model that works first, that adds value to the members of the network, that people are willing to invest time and energy to be a part of, then you are ready to add technology. A digital solution will make sense because it has a context; a context where a digital solution has real problems to solve for real users, not hypothetical problems for nonexistent users.
Even when you have the technology to support the model, just know that the work is never done. Remember, it is a service not a product, and it will require change, growth, attention to user behavior, iteration and continual improvement. But if you start with a good process in place and technology is serving a real need, then you at least avoid the initial dark-age of wondering why you have no users and how your brilliant vision could possibly not be working. In that scenario, you are solving model problems and technology problems simultaneously, and that is unpleasant. It is much slower and much more expensive.
Lesson 5: The Value of Innovation
There has been a lot of talk about innovation, necessity is the mother of invention and how COVID is an opportunity. I agree. There is a huge opportunity here to lead in digital missions work, and I expect we will take huge steps forward as the Church leveraging technology. But I also feel like we have failed in some ways, or that I have failed my organization at the very least.
It is human nature to not want to change things that are working. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” and at OneHope, reaching ~120 Million children and youth with the gospel definitely seems like something that “ain’t broke.”
The innovation team is dedicated to two things: learning and collaboration.
Even when learning is not really necessary to go about business as usual, we look for new ways to create value. We seek to understand our customers better, we look at new technologies, trends and platforms to try to understand how they might apply or affect ministry. Learning takes time and effort and has a real cost. But these past weeks, my team and our knowledge have been in extremely high demand. I cannot tell you how many impromptu meetings I have had, how many conversations where people are looking to us for answers or input. But our ability to learn and apply things to each region and its particular unique situations and cultures is painfully limited.
When you look at collaboration, we invest in relationships and networks like Indigitous, Open.Digerati, Kingdom Code, FaithTech and others who are looking to the future of missions, evangelism and discipleship. Building these networks, and influence in them, also has a real cost in time and effort. But the relationships, opportunities for partnership, new platforms and volunteerism that can be fostered are incredible and worth more than can adequately be accounted for.
I want to advocate for innovation now, not as a quick fix or a source of solutions in unfortunate situations, but as an investment in the future. That by disrupting ourselves, we would never be disrupted to the level that we are now. That we would be practiced, comfortable and experienced at responding to change. The number of tools in our toolbox, competencies in our wheelhouse, and partners who can help us lead would be greatly increased and always growing.
In the future, I do not want to scramble for new solutions when our back is to the wall, I want us to leading the development of new solutions that the rest of the world imitates for our success. I want my whole organization and the whole global church to thrive through a culture of innovation.
COVID-19 is a wake up call that our approach is too small and our scope too narrow. If OneHope and the global Church are to succeed, Innovation needs to move out of our abstract values and into the daily practice of our work. Innovation cannot just be the name of a team, but rather must be the name of the perspective the global team holds. When it is in the fringes, it is not enough. Because I see now that when everyone is forced to change everything, some really cool things are happening. Youth groups who were content with hundreds of students weekly never thought to try doing only digital services. Children’s ministries never gave themselves the time to try creating at home bible engagement videos on instagram live. But when we are disrupted, we learn. Let’s keep disrupting. When we settle into a new digital rhythm, let’s learn again. Let’s preserve this hunger, this optimism, this willingness to roll up our sleeves and do something crazy. It’s not wasteful, it’s not risky, it is an investment and actually can be quite fun.
