Don’t let your digital health today make you complacent about your ministry’s digital future.
Do you video chat with colleagues, family and friends?
Have you ever made a discovery of something new through Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest or any social media site?
Are there people you work with today that you first met online?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the questions, then you are experiencing first-hand the advances in technology that are fundamentally changing every aspect of our everyday lives.
How we communicate, discover, and connect are all being influenced by technology. Digital media is also changing how people learn about God, and how they are influenced for Christ.
Learn from the past, think for the future
This change in behavior is significant to Christian media workers because we are so accustomed to the processes and systems that have been in place for many decades. While we may be living in the digital world personally, there are still a good many of us that love our traditional media platforms and the pre-digital world principles that govern how we reach, influence, and stay in touch with our audiences.
We have familiar operations that enable us to manage people impacted by electronically distributed gospel.
Up to now, we have been building our digital platforms and ministry activities on top of our legacy operations. Pure economics, mostly, have led us to inch our way into the digital world. By taking small incremental steps, we have managed to add the people, the skills and the processes for transitioning from the single media command-and-control environment of the 80’s to the portal-oriented Internet environment of the 90’s, as the Internet expanded.
But now, the days of the single, all-things-to-everyone website are drawing to a close.
You hear it everywhere. Mobile, social and the cloud are the next big things in technology. According to a Forrester study, these disruptive technologies will be key drivers to revolutionize industries but many are not staffed or structured adequately to take full advantage.
As these new technologies unfold, the established rules for online Christian media will once again not necessarily apply. It is going to take new technology providers, new processes, and new ways to work together.
We, the builders of tomorrow’s Christian media enterprises, must learn from the past, take advantage of the present, but think for the future. We need to get ready now for a whole new generation of digital workers who understand the power of interacting technologies and the implications for the gospel.
Keep your feet moving
We might prefer things the way they are now, but ministry leader: the cloud is coming whether we like it or not. Like all disruptive technologies, it is bringing with it a new set of threats and opportunities. We aren’t suggesting dramatic changes in your organization, rather slow and steady, planned incremental steps.
God works through moving feet. Just don’t become complacent. It’s time for a digital checkup.
As you help build this new infrastructure for the future, remember that technology is only a tool. We need to keep our eyes focused on how people are interacting with the technologies, then we can solve the challenge of creating systems and processes for tapping their potential for facilitating spiritual change.
We know God is making all these things possible in this time. For those of us in the business of using media for life change, the stakes are monumental.