Internet Mission

Drew Goodmanson is one of the elders/pastors at Kaleo church in San Diego and one of many men younger than I am who has become something of a mentor to me although we’ve never met nor even corresponded. A prolific blogger, Drew’s blog is one of those I visit regularly.

This post is almost a month late, but since I’ve sent a dozen people to Drew’s blog to download a piece from him, I think it worthwhile to describe it here. At the Acts 29 Regional conference a month ago, which was hosted by Kaleo San Diego and which took place in conjunction with the Acts 29 Church Planting boot camp, Drew made a presentation entitled, “Using the Internet to Gather, Connect, and as a Place of Mission.”

Drew has graciously posted a PDF file with the Powerpoint slides he used, and I await the audio that goes along with it with great eagerness.

A survey of pastors and church leaders across America would arguably show a fairly small percentage of the sample who are really technologically savvy. And this shouldn’t be surprising, given the state of seminary education has not changed appreciably in the past 200 years. In the past decade or so there are some glimpses of change, but seminary education generally concentrates on matters of theology, biblical content and languages, church history, and counseling. Training in mission is generally relegated to elective courses in the typical M.Div. program, and meaningful courses in church and organizational leadership are generally limited to doctoral programs. Currently I don’t know of any major seminary which addresses technology as a tool of mission.

At the risk of offending many readers, I’ll suggest that there are probably more pastors who use the Internet for pornography than for mission – the former doesn’t require any particular skill, care, or effort other than avoiding getting caught, while the latter requires an unusual confluence of technoligical, socio-cultural and theological acumen, and takes considerable effort to do well.

Drew’s presentation helps pastors and church leaders to begin thinking in the right direction to actually begin to leverage the missional potential of the Internet. His presentation breaks down the potential audience of church web presence into three sets, each with a specific audience and a specific action aimed at that audience. The web presence of a church, then has three different actions aimed at three groups.

Members are group 1, the inner circle. Leverage the web to connect them to one another, to the church, and to the mission. The web presence becomes a church portal to extend leadership to small groups and individuals, for the continuing casting of the vision, and mobilization of people to the community.

Group 2 are Christians, the next circle. The church web site gathers these folks, bringing them closer to the church and into it.

The outer circle are non-Christians, and the web site is used as the outward-facing missional arm that makes first contact with them.

In the last half of the 20th century, the way more people came to a church than any other was through personal contact with church members: people’s first contact with a church was through a friend, relative or acquaintence. This is no longer true — often the first contact someone has with a church is through the church web site. If a church has no web site or one which is of poor quality, people who might otherwise come to church will not come. Goodmanson states that a church web site has become for many the “first filter” in finding a church.

Some pastors may argue that many people don’t use the Internet. This may be true, but the people who don’t use the Internet are likely already in church. New generations use the Internet as their primary means of communication, of news and other media, of social networking in a way that is bewildering to earlier generations. But these are the very generations that the church is not reaching effectively. A quality, effective web site is an essential tool for reaching these generations, and churches that don’t have web sites at all or sites that are poorly designed are simply not going to make contact with people from those generations.

This only begins to scratch the surface of the unrealized potential of a techology that many pastors look at as a waste of time or a place of more potential temptation than a place of potential missionary activity. They will not reach younger Americans. A new generation of plugged in, technologically savvy church leaders is coming, and with God’s help will extend the reach of mission via the Internet in creative new ways that are not even imagined by those who scoff at technology as an instrument of mission. Drew’s presentation is a good start.