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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polleverywhere.com SMS Audience Response System

We’ve introduced you to our new series at Water’s Edge called “You Decide.”  The essence of this series is the opportunity for students to text in questions and topics for us to cover in our teaching.  To facilitate this, we’re using the SMS poll service from polleverywhere.com.

It seems really simple from the audience’s viewpoint.  At the start of each service we invite students to text in any questions they’d like us to address.  “Simply text ‘youdecide’ and your question to 99503,” I say, and questions start rolling in.  “Have Twitter? Just tweet an @reply to @poll with ‘youdecide’ and your question.  And if you don’t have a cell phone, you can always go to our website, watersedgeyouth.com and follow the link to submit a question.”

During the week, students can check the live text wall at watersedgeyouth.com and see what questions come in.  As questions are submitted, we moderate the answers to make sure inappropriate messages don’t get posted to the wall of our website.

And all of it is made possible by polleverywhere.com.

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