Thursday, September 13, 2007

"Life moves pretty fast." (Ferris Bueller)

MinistryCOM Church Communications Conference - Day 1

Terry Storch was the opening speaker and he presented the dilemma facing churches today in communicating with today's culture and technology. It was pretty awesome, considering he was able to articulate what I've been thinking about for a few weeks. The internet has changed everything. And the new "version" of the internet is all about personal interaction.

He main 5 points (his presentation was version 30 - 6:30 Starbucks):

1. Churches performed one-way communication (church 1.0). In today's culture, the guy who has a myspace page for his band (that plays in bars) goes to your church. He invites people to your church, but doesn't exactly project your church values. Church 1.0 is all about service times. If you want to learn about Jesus, come when WE do it. People want to participate. Church 2.0 focus on creating experiences anytime. “Anytime” content doesn't have to be the Sunday morning word.

2. Walls. Churches so focused on buildings- if it doesn't happen in the building, it isn't church.

3. Omnipresent Church – if church is about a building, do we put God in a box? At MinistryCOM, 500 attendees representing 300 churches, approx. 1 million influenced, who influence their friends.

4. Re-Imagine Outreach (borrowed from Tom Peters) What does outreach look like? Churches still doing outreaches and missions the same way. With the internet the outreaches should be different. Should be “inreach” through facebook, Church 1.0 = physically “out”. Virtual relationship then move to physically relationship.

5. Church 1.0 = The Power of 1. Everyone invites 1 person. The problem is that is it's addition. Attrition rate is greater than addition in many churches. Time for leaders to get out of mindset of addition and multiplication. One person can invite EVERYBODY if content is delivered the way users want it. It's about the name of Jesus, not the one on the side of the building.

There are the highlights of Terry's presentation. And he made a comment about wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

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