Digital Breathe - Living Simply Complicated

Wife's text response: "You could pick your bible and read it."

My thoughts: "How?!? The internet is down, so therefore crosswalk is not available, nor youversion, or any others, so how do I read the bible, dang it!"

I realize in life how digital I have become when even reading the bible or popular book becomes online reading or listening to an audio mp3. I grew up on a PC and now have been on a Mac for about 2 years and am quite the aficionado. I have always had this deep desire to learn as much as I can when it comes to technology. I would take apart my parents VCR just to see it then put it back together as a child, a slight affection towards tech stuff. Made magazines are a techies dream escape.

When it comes to ministry and technology and the digital life we as leaders/pastors/creatives strategize our efforts. The truth is things are a changin'. Therefore our strategies must change and adapt. I have realized that so much of my world is concentrated around the use of technology. If I got away from my alarm that sits on my nightstand and used my cell phone to wake me up then my entire world could be classified as mobile. Music, I got my old school 30gb iPod with as much movies as I do music and a few seasons of The Office. For calls, texts, tweets, light email and internet I got my Moto Q9C. For the rest of my brain I got my Macbook Pro, this helps me with EVERYTHING, literally my world is inside that or online. Here are a couple things I use:

• My calendar syncs from iCal to Google Calendars to Plaxo. It automatically updates all birthdays and anniversaries from Facebook and Plaxo updates to my iCal.
• All my contacts sync from my Address Book to phone to Google contacts to Plaxo to Linkedin, etc, etc.
• Every sermon I have every wrote over the last 8 years, every thought, two books in progress, and teaching, leadership lesson, etc are on my 120gb Macbook Pro that syncs to all my files on my work computer and many files synced to Google Documents.

I could keep going... my simply complicated life is wired! The internet and phone is down and I found myself sitting there dazed and confused. I would attempt to say most people, at least leaders/pastors/creatives are overly encompassed by their need of their tethered electronic world.

One thing to keep in mind is the people around us, your audience, the world around us is moving to a technologically attached mainframe. Many churches are looking at going to an internet campus. and looking at the internet as a viable asset to their churches.

The Denver Post wrote a great article on the role of technology in the church. Here is one important thought from the article that was very important:

“Church is not the Internet or a building — it’s people.” If the notion that a virtual community can be as real as a physical one seems crazy, you may be showing your age.

Thanks to online shopping, online dating, online social networking and online darn-near-everything-else, many young Americans don’t distinguish between their friends from school and those fromFacebook.

These youngsters just see them all as friends, said David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, a consulting firm that conducts survey research for churches and other religious groups.

In fact, Kinnaman’s firm predicts that by 2010, 10 percent of Americans will rely exclusively on the Internet for their religious experience.

10 percent! This is a moment that we must engage ourselves into our changing culture, we must ride the tide instead of chase the wave. That wave is understanding the language of the culture. A good friend of mine, Travis Clark defined culture in his blog as...

"...the "language" that people are currently speaking. And for us as leaders we must learn that "language" in order to engage the people."

If we do not begin to speak the language of our culture we become ignorant because we don't have the capacity to make intelligent conversation. The lanuguage is becoming more digital day by day.

Rhett Smith points out that the “front door” of churches is no longer a “physical” door:

Do we even realize that the physical building isn’t the front door anymore, but that the online world is the front door? If you don’t have a strong [online] presence, or aren’t telling a good story online, which is the front door–will you be able to bring people from the online world, to the physical front door of the church?

For the moment that we had no internet I realized that my "online" and "offline" are one in the same. As a matter of fact when it happend that for almost a whole day I was "offline" my life felt wierd. I belive for many that line will begin to blur more as more generations rise up with a connected lifestyle. Online and offline is simply becoming 'life', simple and functional.

As Justin Wise says, "If you (and your church) don’t begin to understand and learn to speak the language of this younger generation, no amount of catch-up and “digital cramming” will help in as little as five years."

One thing I have been thinking about and not really heard much buzz around it but guarantee if I searched hard enough over at churchmarketingsucks.com or beyondrelevance.com I could find a post on the topic of the difference between consumers that come to you/your church website versus the future of the consumer that is wanting you to feed them your information. We need to rethink how we are getting information to people, feeders and aggregates are the futures muscle for getting people information. Every person pretty much carries a cell phone, they are your mobile consumers, get them the information they want in their hands which is convenient. We need to begin to think smarter not harder.

So are you able to engage your culture in a whole new way? Does the digital language something you are willing to tackle? Are you willing to translate the previous language to the digital language?

So let me ask you, are these patterns happening in your local church? Does the ends justify the means?