On media and ministry

Daryl Madi sent me a link to something Phil Cooke wrote - it's pretty insightful but there is nothing particularly earth shattering about what he says:

Be creative!
Understand that it's what people perceive, not what you say!
Use language that the culture understands!
Branding is a key part of the message!
Narrow cast to niches!

Pretty standard stuff, really - anyone paying attention in ministry knows this.

Yet we also have to admit that most churches probably don't do any of these things very well. And in my humble opinion this has far more to do with the way ministries make decisions and manage risk than it does with any lack of knowledge or capability.

It seems to me that most Churches have two classes of decision-making: those under scriptural authority and the more mundane, administrative or human ones. For the first type we are (thankfully) a bit of a skilled dictatorship - delegating the decisions to trained pastors who's writ is absolute subject to the oversight of the session, Presbytery etc.

Everything else - the 'administrative stuff' we treat as negotiable and therefore subject to committees and consensus because unlike doctrine, there is no capital T truth involved in how we mow the lawn. This has historically applied to a lot of stuff that we now call 'branding', 'media' or 'communications'. This is because these items in the industrial age were physical elements somewhat separated from the preaching of the word. The venue was a building, the newsletter was printing.

What has happened is that as Marshall McLuhan famously said: 'The Medium has (at least in part) become the Message' - preaching is linked to communication media is linked to feedback which initiates subsidiary threads that spread in all directions with little or no mediation by the center. And all online. Telling where the authoritative 'message' leaves off and the non-authoritative 'medium' starts is getting harder and harder.

And this is compounded by shorter and shorter comm. cycles: Tsunami hits? If you want to be relevant you'd better be messaging that night.

This (in my humble, if long winded opinion) has implications:

1. The scope of 'authority' where worship or ministry leaders need to be able to make decisions quickly is expanding from just the spoken and written word to a whole host of communications media and design elements.

2. The scope of things in these areas that can be consigned to administrative processes that demand consensus and committees to get things done is shrinking.

3. The pace and sheer 'strangeness' of change makes it hard to 'focus group' the congregation to reduce innovation risk. The tools and techniques are inexpensive and easy enough to use that the market testing can be done in real time with ‘live ammo' so to speak.

4. This means that many more things can be done and tried but because we have no valid way to test them, each of them carries far more risk of failure. Which we need to learn to accept.

5. Therefore we need to shift the way we govern many of these things so that empowered ministry leaders can act subject to ex post oversight rather than a priori approval. The role of the oversight - much like that for pastors on doctrinal issues - would be to ensure directional correctness, risk management and appropriate resource allocation, not detailed decisions or approvals prior to execution.

And most existing congregations won't be able to do this. Which is why they will stagnate, wither and die. Schumpetarian 'creative destruction' applies to the church just as much as the secular world.

Perhaps more so.