From Sampler to Sower

I saw a post the other day on the Swerve blog from Lifechurch’s innovation leader (and fellow former Decaturian) Bobby Gruenewald about a time when the Presbyterian Church took official action against the dangers of riding your bicycle on Sunday.  Bobby sees in this bit of arcane Americana a reflection of how the church often responds to innovation.  He writes:

It speaks volumes about how the Church reacts to innovation at times. Instead of embracing it and looking for ways to leverage it, we feel threatened.

Obviously, this kind of reaction reminds us of cell phones in church.  But that is beginning to change.

After years of slides, videos and announcements asking people to turn off their cell phones and pagers, we’re seeing more and more stories these days about churches that are telling people to turn on their cell phones.  From encouraging people to tweet about their worship experience to using SMS polls to solicit instant responses from the congregation, to the creation of YouVersion Live, a fascinating mashup of Scripture and Social Media, the signs of a turning in the tide are everywhere.

It’s no secret our youth ministry has been asking the question “How can we leverage SMS and MMS technology for the kingdom?“  Last Lent we started asking the question “How can we make sure the next time one of our students pulls out their cell phone to tell a friend ‘Hey check this out’ that the content they are sharing comes from Water’s Edge?”  We’re still asking that question.  Our You Decide series is also trying to leverage SMS technology to engage students in community and conversation.  But we’ve still got a long way to go.

Here are some ideas we and others have used to try to leverage the ubiquitous cell phone technology rather than try to fight it.  Some of them are just for fun, to get people talking. “You wouldn’t believe what we did at Water’s Edge this week.”  Others are more directly related to our attempts to minister to our teens or reach out to others.

1. Cell Phone Picture Challenge: Tim Schmoyer at studentministry.org recently blogged about an in-house picture scavenger hunt game they played with cell phones at their youth ministry.  (An idea that was itself inspired by a suggestion from Jonathan McKee on the Youth Specialties podcast.)

2. Macro Middletown: We did a photographic scavenger hunt of a different sort.  We took close up pictures from several locations in town, and then challenged students to send us pix messages of themselves in those locations. Each day we added more pictures and student got bonus points for getting the pictures in the same day the new locations were posted.

3. YouVersion Live: This one is beyond the scope of our youth ministry right now — it requires a web enabled phone to work, rather than simply relying on SMS or MMS, and most of our students don’t have data packages yet.  However, we can’t talk about leveraging cell phone technology for ministry without mentioning the exciting things the digerati at Lifechurch are doing.  YouVersion Live brings a whole new level of interaction to preaching and teaching.  Check out the link to see all it can do.

4. Prayer Hotline: This is actually a revision of an idea I used way back before cell phones when I was still carrying a pager.  Back then I gave each student a unique id code and a list of numbers assigned to typical prayer needs and told them they could page me any time and know I’d be praying for them.  Now days we use cell phones to take in prayer requests.  A Ping.fm account with a unique email address that students can text allows them to send in prayer requests that show up in an rss feed on a special prayer request website.  There’s no moderation involved with Ping.fm, so the email address can’t be passed out to the whole world, but with the moderation available with Presenter plan from Poll Everywhere you could do the same thing and still have some control over what gets posted to your site.

5. Instant Evangelism: I hesitate to call this evangelism, because evangelism is so much more than just  inviting people to come to church with you, but with cell phones you can encourage your teens to instantly reach out to their friends.  Rather than relying on them to remember to invite a friend for next week’s service, why not tell them “Next week we’re going to be talking about xxxxxx and maybe you have a friend that could really use this.  Go ahead, take out your phones and text them right now to invite them to next week’s service.”

6. Instant Feedback: Whether your teens know they can tweet an @reply to you that will show up on your iPhone while you speak on the stage, or you set up a Poll Everywhere feedback keyword to solicit responses, providing means to ask questions or make comments while you are teaching can help you respond to audience questions or confusion without interrupting the flow of teaching with a question from the audience.

7. Sermon Notes to Go: We have a twitter account and tweet our outlines to our Senior High students as we teach every week. For those that are present, it gives them an outline and scripture references they can take home with them.  For those that have to miss a week, they can still see what we’re talking about even though they aren’t there in person.  And getting people signed up is as easy as telling them “Send a text message with the words “Follow Watersedgeyouth” to 40404 and you’re good to go.”  (Of course, you’ll want to substitute your own username…

Chances are, some of you out there are seeking to leverage technology too.  How are you using cell phones to enhance your ministry?