Shane Hipps @ Biola
Shane Hipps spoke in chapel at Biola last week as part of a series on “Digital Formation: How Technology Shapes Our Faith”. Hipps, author of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture and Flickering Pixels, spoke to the students on how the use of technology itself is not neutral and how we need to consider the effect that technology has on our spiritual life.
I have been an admirer of Shane’s for the last couple years, the highlight of which was my interview with him for my Internet Ministry class last January. I used his first book as a foundation for that class and again for my online course this summer. Below is the video of his chapel appearance last week. Hipps spoke again on Wednesday on the topic of listening for God’s calling in your life. For more Biola chapels, visit the Biola YouTube channel.
Online Course for Summer 2010: Using the Internet and Social Media for Ministry
There is a need for those being trained in ministry to understand the full potential of the Internet. In their open letter to colleges, the Internet Evangelism Coalition states:
We thank God that some ministries and missions are already ‘seizing the day’ and using the Web effectively for outreach. But unfortunately, these are the exception. Although there are vast numbers of Christian websites and blogs, the overwhelming majority are only for Christians. Church websites can be very off-putting to outsiders. The situation is even worse in non-English languages. Most cross-cultural mission agencies are not using the Web for evangelism. The opportunities to use this God-given tool are immense, but not yet being grasped.
We wonder if this is a gap that colleges like yours could be poised to fill. With your vision, experience and resources, you could help to shape and establish a web evangelism movement that will impact the world for years to come. This new medium also offers many opportunities for student placements, assignments and research projects.
This coming summer (2010), I will be offering an online course in Internet ministry in my role here as a professor at Biola University. I am very excited about this course and hope it can become a regular course that I teach at Biola and possibly expand to other programs at other colleges. Click here to see the first draft of the course syllabus.
If you are a Biola graduate student and want to find out more about this course, please contact me via email.
If you are not a Biola student and you want to know how you can take this course, please read the letter I sent to dozens of other colleges regarding this possibility.
Kicking off 2010
A belated “Happy New Year!” to everyone. I wanted to start off the new year by dusting off this old blog and making it what it was always meant to be: a resource for those who are doing ministry online. In particular, my focus is in the area of research and education for online ministry, though any topic regarding online ministry may show up here. So take a look around, you may notice that I have cleaned some things up and added some new information here and there.
So what is in store for 2010? Glad you asked:
- I will be on a “half-sabbatical” this entire year at Biola, which means that I will only be teaching a half-load of classes and the rest of the time can focus on a research project. In my case, that research project will be a book on online ministry. This book will be based on the research that I have been doing, along with my experiences teaching a course in the topic and working with various ministries. As I am writing, I will be sharing ideas and questions on my blog and asking for your feedback.
- I will be teaching a course in Internet Ministry this summer at Biola. This will be similar to the course I taught last spring, but with one big difference: it will be online. If you are student at Biola or another university (grad or undergrad) and would like to participate in this course, let me know! I will be writing about my ideas for this course on this blog as well.
- I will be going to Turkey in March as part of TIEN 2010 where I will meet with church leaders and others interested in using the Internet to reach that part of the world for Christ.
- I am part of a team putting together some sessions around the idea of online ministry at the CLA 2010 conference in April. Most of the ideas and writings for that are being done over at State of Ministry Online, but you will hear about it from time to time on this blog as well.
- As any good researcher should do, I am actively seeking out others who write, teach, and research in this area. The goal of this is to stay informed and to be sure I am not duplicating the work of anyone else. I am now actively using Google reader to track what those people have to say. As I find articles or information that I find very valuable, I will share them on Google reader, which allows others (such as you, dear reader) to subscribe to these shared items and interact on them. I will be highlighting the best of what I am reading and sharing on this blog approximately once a week.
A lot of work on Internet ministry is going to happen in 2010 – stay tuned to this site for the latest. I would love to know what you are doing in the field of Internet ministry this year, or if you have a recommendation for someone I should be keeping up with. Let me know in the comments.
Announcing the Internet Ministry Partnership Project
I am pleased to announce the availability of the Internet Ministry Partnership Project. This site is set up as a place for Christ-followers to come and get advice, answers to questions, and practical education in their quest to use the Internet and new media in ministry. Whether you are involved in a ministry organization or just want to do online ministry as an individual, joining this partnership will provide you with support, encouragement, and real hands-on help as you work to use the Internet to fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment.
IMPP is a resource available to all ministries who are looking to use the Internet as a tool to support their goals. The site provides some free resources as well as online education classes, available for a modest fee. The first course being offered on this site is Internet Ministry Strategy Development. This course will provide you with a set of tools that you can use to understand how to best use the Internet in your ministry. This course is based on the course I taught here at Biola University last spring. Right now, the course is available at a discount during the September preview period.
For more information on the Internet Ministry Partnership Project, visit the site at http://genesys11.com/impp.
Interview with Shane Hipps
In January of 2009, I interviewed Shane Hipps about his book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. I did this as a way to gain insight into the book for the students in my Internet Ministry course at Biola University. I have also shown this video as part of my “God in the Tubes” workshops that I held in Indiana in March 2009. I have been receiving quite a bit of positive feedback about this video (a recorded Skype phone call, actually) and so I recently asked Shane if he would have a problem with me making it available for others to see. He has given his permission, so I am making it available, at least temporarily, on my genesys11 web site. › Continue reading
Using Twitter intentionally
As many of you know, I have been doing an “experiment” with Twitter over the past couple of weeks. My first experience with Twitter last year were frustrating and disappointing and I became a Twitter “hater”. I could not understand why everyone was getting so excited! However, I did decide to keep an open mind and give it another chance.
Last week, Cynthia Ware came to my Internet Ministry class here at Biola. Cynthia shared with my class her vision for the Church and new media. Especially interesting was her presentation of “New Media Values”, which really gave the class, and me, perspective on how our culture and technology are shaping each other. I won’t present those values here, I will leave that to Cynthia (write that book!). › Continue reading
SEO for ministry
In my survey on Internet ministry, I asked the participants if they had optimized their site for search engines. Forty-two percent of the respondents said that they had indeed done some form of SEO. And thirty-two percent stated that they counted on search engine results as the primary means for people to find their sites.
I also left a spot for comments on just how these ministries were doing “search engine optimization” (SEO) on their sites:
“The more we are integrated with other sites (Facebook, blogs, etc.) the better.”
“Ask the congregation to search for the site.”
“Create web pages for other churches in the area.”
“I believe that doing SEO is just part of doing good site design. If you have a web site, you want people to find it. If you want people to find it, you must show up in search results.” › Continue reading
Twitter: Real time access to our least important thoughts…
As many of you know, my Internet ministry class is looking at Twitter this week as a tool for ministry. I myself am trying it out again, but I am not liking it any better. This clip from the Daily Show sums up my feelings on Twitter, here’s a quote:
Twitter offers real time access to some of our most important leaders’ and newspeople’s least important thoughts, 140 characters at a time. It’s no wonder young people love it, according to reports about young people by middle aged people.
Cynthia – save us!
Note: embedded flash player below – if your browser does not support, watch it on Hulu.
Giving Twitter another try
I joined up on Twitter several months ago and never could figure out what it was good for. I heard about it on the TWiT podcast and it was being talked up like it was going to change the way people communicated with each other. If you haven’t heard of Twitter, the easiest way to describe it is as a clearinghouse for text messaging: you send the text message to Twitter and it forwards it on to anyone who has chosen to receive messages from you. The tools of Twitter are the Twitter web site, your mobile phone, and a plethora of third-party Twitter tools. Twitter allows you to customize how you send and receive messages to meet your needs – if you would rather not involve your mobile phone, then you can use their web site or other software tool. The only real restriction is that the messages must fit within the 140-character limit of a text message.
So I signed up last year and began subscribing to messages from a few people, but the novelty wore off quickly and I pretty much disconnected myself. It seemed that all I got were messages from people telling me that they were having a latte at Starbucks or that they hated the weather or other commentary that was just not interesting to me. When I spoke at the Internet Ministry Conference last fall, there was unbounded enthusiasm among much of the “ministrati” (that is, the ministry digerati) for using Twitter as a ministry tool (though there was also a minority of Twitter haters as well). I tried to understand their enthusiasm, but I just couldn’t. To me, Twitter was just another honk in the vast sea of Internet noise.
Last week, Cynthia Ware visited my Internet ministry class. She has been a big fan of Twitter for quite a while and sees its potential for ministry. Though I don’t (yet) share her views, I think a discussion of Twitter’s capabilities for ministries is important, so I invited her to speak in my class next month on just that topic. I asked Cynthia if she had a resource that could help me understand some Twitter “best practices”, and she pointed me to a new e-book on Twitter called The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, by Anthony Coppedge. This book explains what Twitter is and how it can be used in a church setting. It does a good job of explaining the fundamentals of Twitter as well as giving specific examples of its use.
After reading the book, and further discussion with Cynthia, I am going to withhold judgment on Twitter and re-evaluate it. In fact, I do have one theory about Twitter that I will put to the test over the coming weeks: Twitter could be the breakthrough tool that will bridge the online/offline gap. Every organization that plans on using the Internet for ministry must deal with how to bring the online and offline worlds together. Twitter, with its ability to integrate with mobile devices and web sites, may be the tool that finally allows us to bring those two worlds together.
So, I am re-starting my use of Twitter and giving it renewed effort. I have updated my Twitter username to “DaveBourgeois”, I have begun “following” several more people, I have installed a Twitter “gadget” on my home page, I use Twitter to update my Facebook status, and I have installed a software tool called twhirl which is supposed to make Twitter easier to use. I have even put a Twitter “widget” on the sidebar of this blog that shows my latest “tweets” and gives you the option to “follow” me. I will keep you posted on my thoughts as my experiment progresses, both on this blog and on Twitter, of course!
What you save them WITH is what you save them TO
Last week, I began a discussion about LifeChurch.tv and their implementation of an online “campus” for their church. That post grew out of ongoing discussions we are having in my Internet Ministry class at Biola, where my students are working to develop a philosophy of Internet ministry. In that post I discussed how skeptical I was about trying to do ALL facets of a church service online. Many churches will post audio and video of their services, but they do not even begin to claim that experiencing church through the website is the ideal experience. To be fair, LifeChurch is not the only church doing this, there are others. But they seem to be the most innovative and prominent of the bunch.
Now, before I go on, let me just stop and say that I think that LifeChurch is doing an absolutely amazing job of utilizing the latest technologies and working to understand their implications. From blogs to video to Twitter to Second Life, they have all of their bases covered. And I have no doubt that they are changing lives and impacting the world in a positive way for Christ. They are an absolutely amazing ministry. They now have thirteen physical campuses serving several different communities across the United States. Each location is unique, but yet united together through the transmission of the main message via satellite. As their “About” page says: “Through satellite broadcasts that enable all of our twelve locations to be connected as one, LifeChurch.tv is a multi-site church that transcends metropolitan regions.” Their innovation is not just with technology: they also make all of their media resources available to other churches to use, at no charge. This is truly an amazing ministry with amazing people that God is using for His glory.
I ended my post last time by asking the questions:
…isn’t an ‘incomplete’ Christian experience better than no Christian experience at all? There are many who would never go to “church” (or are unable to for some reason) but would be willing to attend a service online. Doesn’t that make it worth it?
These are probably some of the most compelling reasons to put church online. I know of several people who would never want to go into a church building with me, but would be willing to check out a service online. And I would feel very comfortable telling them about LifeChurch’s online campus. But I would also be sure to follow up with them and encourage them to become a part of a local church body (whether mine or another). This discussion was brought up in our class during a conversation with Matt Anderson, the author of a chapter in one of the books we are using in the course. When asked about this specific question (“what about those who would never go to church otherwise?”), he responded that he understood this line of thinking, but also cautioned: “what we save them with is what we save them to.” In other words, if someone gets saved via an online church they will also see that church as “normal” and will possibly never move beyond that church experience. Matt went on to state that Christianity is a physical religion: Jesus became man and interacted with us in the flesh. We are commanded to fellowship with each other. A Christian who “forsakes the assembly” is shortchanging themselves and disobeying God.
It comes down to this question: is a physical presence necessary in order for fellowship to happen? Shane Hipps, pastor and author of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture, thinks so. In an interview I had with him for my class, he stated that for authentic community to happen, four components must exist: a shared history, permance, proximity, and a shared imagination of the future. He said that the Internet, primarily, can provide the last of the four, but is really limited in its ability to create the first three. He went on to say that “there is something energetically, spiritually that happens to a relationship when you are in the same room. And it’s fundamentally different than a disembodied relationship [via the Internet].”
Let me conclude by saying that I applaud what LifeChurch is doing overall. Their innovative work on the Internet is paving the way for other ministries to get online. Their willingness to share resources is inspiring. Where I differ with them (and other churches with Internet campuses) is their decision to try to implement the full church experience through their Internet campus. Online church services provide a valuable service to those unable to attend a physical church and to those who would never enter a church on their own accord. But these folks must be directed to find a local body of believers, real flesh and blood, and it must be made clear that the online church service is never to replace attending physically.
I know that there are those who disagree with me. This is the place for a healthy debate. My students are wrestling with this issue as well and all comments are welcome.
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Welcome to the Lessons From Babel blog
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- Dave Bourgeois
