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.

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Sunday, May 17 was Emergency Personnel Sunday at the Middletown Church of the Nazarene.  We invited local police fire and emergency medical personnel from our communities to our service so that we could thank and honor them.  We had representatives not only from Middletown, but Muncie, Anderson, New Castle and Sulphur Springs, as well as from all three counties that surround us.  It really was a special day.

And it was a successful day for outreach.  Attendance was up 11% from last week (Mother’s Day) and up 32% from two weeks ago.

But the best part though, weren’t the number, but the faces.  Taking pictures of the event, I saw lots of smiling kids.  Even better, in the backgrounds of a lot of the pictures are smiling parents and grandparents.  That’s the best part.

Here’s a video compilation of the pictures from the event, as well as my top ten favorite photos of the day.  You can find the all the photos on my flickr page.

My top ten photos after the jump…

My two youngest children look in to watch their oldest brother, Brenden, sit behind the controls of the St. Vincent's/ PHI Dove Flight helicopter. Almost missed the photo too - one of the Dove Flight technicians pointed them out to me while I was taking pictures of Brenden.

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So, you’ve mastered the art of harnessing the power of friendliness and because of word of mouth and word of mouse, new teens are checking out your youth ministry.  Now that they’re here, how do you make sure they “stick?”

The answer, in a word, is hospitality.  Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary defines it as “the cordial and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers socially or commercially.”  My favorite definition however comes from Washington Irving who said “There is an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality which cannot be described, but is immediately felt and puts the stranger at once at his ease.” (from his story “Christmas Eve” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.)

I like that a lot.  Genuine hospitality is hard to define and when you try to do so you end up with a cold fish of a phrase like “the cordial and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers socially or commercially.”  (No offense, George, Charles and Noah.)  But while hospitality is hard to define, it’s easy to recognize.  Some places, some people, simply have a way of putting a guest at ease which is immediately felt by all.

But more than something that we do, hospitable is something that we are.  Danny Meyer, author of Setting the Table puts it this way:

“Hospitality is present when something happens for you.  It is absent when something happens to you.  These two simple concepts—for and to—express it all.”

As long as we equate hospitality with all the things we do to our visitors, we miss the point.   Instead we must be hospitable for them, and most of that hospitality takes place long before they ever visit.  If I were writing the dictionary, I’d define hospitality as “the way we show others that we had them in mind before they ever came be our guest.”  Maybe it’s the Wesleyan in me, but hospitality is prevenient.

So how do we become a hospitable youth group?

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At Water’s Edge, we believe in friendship evangelism, and we understand that our job it to equip teenagers to share their faith with their friends. Our goal is to design a weekly youth program which makes sharing your faith is as easy as saying “Hey, do you want to come to Water’s Edge with me?” But how does a youth ministry make sure they are equipping their teens to reach out in this way, rather than using a professed faith in friendship evangelism as a way to pass the buck of responsibility for evangelism to their teens?

This weekend I’ll be leading a couple workshops entitled “Building a Friend-Friendly Youth Event” at our District’s fall retreat.  That really has me thinking about friendship evangelism and how we equip our teens for it.  In my mind there are two closely related aspects to success in this area.  The first is to unleash the power of the personal invitation.  The second is to practice hospitality so that when the invitation is accepted, guests are more likely to stick.  I’ll be tackling these two topics in a couple of posts.  And I’d love to have some feedback before I head off to retreat.  Sound off in the comments below.

Now, as for harnessing the power of friendship: (more…)