The sermon…it’s come quite far since Jesus stood on the ‘mount’ and delivered a timeless message. I believe the current format in which we execute a ‘sermon’ is fairly well broken. The job a pastor hires a sermon to perform in 2012 is the same as in 1912 or 1812 yet the sermon format is having less and less effect on culture. Jesus could more or less start a riot with an eight minute illustration yet the average pastor can’t get 100 people to change their behavior after 40 minutes of multi-media supported exposition.

Maybe 40 minutes isn’t long enough? Earlier this month my ‘sermon’ at Gateway Church was a week long! Let me break it down for you.

Thursday | Setup up the Weekend

On Thursday I posted on the Gateway Church Facebook page the following post:

It’s not a life changing post, make no mistake, but something about it made it engaging. In fact, it was the most reacted to post for all of 2011 on our Facebook page. What the post did was plant the idea that Sunday was coming in their minds and allowed Sunday to start for them right then and there.

The Thursday Facebook post is a great opportunity to warm people up to the content that will be delivered on Sunday. This can be a challenging question or in this case a curious photo that actually got people talking. There was even some people upset about the photo, as you’ll see in the comments, so maybe we were doing something right. In the future I’m going to use a video specifically for the Thursday post.

We find that Friday and Saturday are fairly dead on our social networks so we don’t do a whole lot in the way of strategic interaction those days.

Sunday | Delivery

On Sunday Bruce Gilson and I did something we had been talking about for a few months, we taught the message together and at one point we were on stage at the same time. This is more or less an aside and something I’ll get into later as we learn more about the potential there. Back to the delivery; During one section of the teaching I intentionally focused on delivering, for about 4 minutes, a story that could stand alone and be cut from the message and served as a stand alone video on the web.

This is a big departure from how I was taught to teach in homiletics class in college where we were told to teach in an arc with everything tied together. The segment I focused on definitely served the arc of the day, don’t get me wrong, but it forced me to consider those who might watch the clip days (or even years) later rather than the few thousand people that were in the room that day.

Monday | Follow Up

On Monday via our social network outposts (here’s one thread from one of our campuses) we asked a follow up question to the action point I closed the Sunday message with. This gave our community the chance to revisit the teaching and connect with each other as they shared their story of how they executed the ask from Sunday during their day.

Tuesday | Revist

Tuesday is really simple, we post the video of the entire message. You should be doing this every week (audio if that’s what you got) regardless of strategy.

Wednesday | Share

On Wednesday we post the stand alone little nugget from the teaching. This is the part I delivered with the intent that it would be a short clip that needed to provide virtue in and of itself on the web. This is the clip we wanted people to share on their own social channels because it is very portable and easy for someone to tune into. In fact, I delivered the content while doing the best I could to disconnect people from the fact that this was happening in a church if only for that moment. This allows people of all paradigms to glean something from the content. Truth be told their are people that as soon as they see it is a pastor teaching in a church they dismiss the content.

This is also late enough in the week that it may encourage someone seeing this on the feeds of people in our community to take a second look at Gateway Church and maybe engage with us on Sunday at one of our campuses.

Your team should be doing this now…like this week. If you are at a small church and as the teacher you probably have direct access to the channels needed to pull this off. If you are at a larger church it may take a lot more coordination to execute the week long sermon but from our experience it is worth it, especially as Sunday is losing value and we look to new ways to engage as a church community.

Last year I discovered Top Gear on the BBC while perusing Netflix for something to watch. I’m not that into cars; after all I drive a Kia. But I was quickly drawn into the show. The format was refreshing. The personalities were magnetic and so was their chemistry. The dialogue was witty and the overall quality of the content was phenomenal. It also captivated me because in 2009 we piloted a similar format for 4 weeks at Gateway Church as we explored what it would take to do church on the internet. So my immediate reaction to seeing an episode of Top Gear was: this is the future of church! A short time later I realized that Top Gear was garnering 350 million viewers weekly with 300 million more watching later via the web making it essentially the most watched english speaking television program in the world at more than half a billion viewers.

What Top Gear does right

Top Gear Has Multiple Personalities

Top Gear has three hosts, which is to say they don’t have a host and then ‘co-hosts’. This is different than what we’re used to on information based TV and clearly different than what we are used to in Church. We are accustomed to a lead personality that is supported by others to fill in the gaps where needed but mainly to serve the voice of the lead personality. Having three unique personalities allows the creative team of Top Gear to put the right personality into the right segment without the audience feeling like this is a pinch hitter and thus check out. Each personality has equal equity with the audience and can carry a segment alone or with one or more of the others without a hitch.

We have a teaching team at Gateway Church and it is starting to really pick up some steam in terms of what we are capable of creatively. A couple years ago we stopped posting who would be teaching on Sunday on the website because we wanted to communicate that the Sunday experience was a quality experience that superseded who was delivering the teaching segment.

The future of church is multiple personalities rather than the alpha male model we have seen the last 100 years.

Top Gear is a Segmented Experience

A Top Gear episode generally consists of several non-linear and un-related segments that can stand on their own or serve a greater story by tying together with the other segments. You may have a segment live in the studio and then cut to a short film on a particular car that was produced earlier and then move to a live interview in the studio. The beauty is that all of those ‘bits’ can stand alone. If all you ever saw was the short 7 minute film on a Mercedes, the story therein would be complete and not lacking for not experiencing what was before or after.

What we do in Church on Sunday morning is deliver an hour or longer experience that has pieces stacked together that are dependent on each other to tell a bigger story and deliver a ‘take-away’ to those present. The music, the drama, the short film or the movie clip are designed to support a bigger arc more or less fall flat if it was the only bit one experienced. This makes it difficult for the experience to live on beyond Sunday morning which is or paramount importance in our new media culture.

The future of church is a segmented non-linear experience.

Top Gear is Shareable

For something to be shareable it needs two components; portability and broad appeal. Top Gear obviously has broad appeal as it is the most watched English speaking show on the planet but why does a car show have such broad appeal? I can only speak for myself on this one but my guess is I’m not alone; I don’t really care that much or know that much about cars so it’s safe to say that the topic in and of itself is not that interesting to me (and others). The creative people at Top Gear have managed to make a show that is essentially about something that most people aren’t that interested in and made it remarkable.

I can see it in people’s faces when I tell them about this show they have not seen. When I mention it’s a car show they immediately tune out and I have to begin the hard sell. Sound familiar (think inviting someone to church)? Top Gear seems to stop at nothing to achieve quality and they make no apologies to automotive purists for their style that creates such broad appeal. It is very clear the the hosts know A LOT about cars, but they don’t speak in high level expert terms, they instead make it reachable for people like me who know very little.

Top Gear is also portable because of the nature of the segmented experience. If I were to share a 40 minute video on my Facebook or Twitter feed the amount of people who would watch the whole thing would be small and in turn the amount of people who share it based on that would be smaller yet. But a 5 minute high quality short film on a something remarkable like an amazing car or something related to driving stands a much greater chance of being shared and consumed on social networks.

The future of church is compact shareable content.

Top Gear Has Shelf Life

I can watch an episode or a segment of Top Gear that is 5 years old or one that premiered last week and very little, almost none, of the content is lost due to time lapse. The writing and creative elements of Top Gear are not dependent on current events to deliver virtue to the user.

How often does the content delivered on a Sunday morning, especially during the teaching/preaching segment, depend on current events; not to mention references to local realities alienating people not living in proximity to the church? This is probably the lowest hanging fruit on this tree that your church team can grab onto and adapt to this weekend’s service.

The future of church is content that has indefinite shelf life on the web.

Top Gear Runs in Seasons

Top Gear doesn’t air every week of the year. Like most TV shows it runs during seasons, in this case in the fall and in the spring. This is not to say that the team at Top Gear takes the rest of the year off; it’s a full time gig creating content of this quality. Top Gear does augment throughout the year in social space with teasers and specials.

This is going to be the biggest turn for the church but I believe it is the future. If the experience is good enough and has shelf life and shareability running for only a couple of seasons would be a viable model for a church. This would need to be augmented with hyper local community gatherings, serving/community projects and other relational experiences throughout the year. Imagine a church the was built on a foundation of relationships rather than a shared consumption experience? The biggest hurdle your team faces is that Sunday happens every seven days and that greatly reduces the quality and impact of your content.

The future of church is running the time and place gathering in seasons.

Can this be done?

I really believe this is the future of church and I also think we can take steps in this direction now. You can build your Sunday experience now with multiple personalities, segmentation, shareability and shelf life without fracturing what it is you already do. The concept of seasons will take a pretty big paradigm shift for just about every church…but I think it’s the future none the less.

We have seen the internet have real world impact in places like China, Haiti, North Africa and the like but I don’t think we have had anywhere near that kind impact in the United States until now.  Until now the internet has been a catalyst for business and for cat videos but it had not made significant waves in the political arena in our country. Maybe this is because, for all it’s failings, the major news outlets do a fairly good job at informing the public. It didn’t take an economic genius to see that the news media was not going to tell the American public the whole story on PIPA and SOPA as they clearly had skin in the game; we all know how their bread is buttered.

January 18th, 2012 will be marked as the day that the internet crossed the line from peanut gallery in the public discussion to a force of change.

What’s to come?

This won’t stop. The MPAA even publicly chastised the politicians that it owns so we know that these people are bold. The politicians who pressed the bill forward did so without a clue as to what it was and they didn’t care…they even laughed about how they didn’t understand it.

The next move for would be censors is the do one of two things:

Sneak the bill into some other random legislation. This happens all the time; a bill is created to say…spend a certain amount of money to feed starving children and an amendment will be added that has nothing to do with it that effectively does what SOPA and PIPA were to do.

In this new age of the interent they may not be able to sneak that by so they have to go with option two: protect kids from child predators. I expect a bill to come up in the next year or so that is sold as an initiative to protect our kids from predators and porn but it will grant the same powers to corporations and lump the cost of executing  said policing to companies that threaten old media and this will put them out of business because they can’t afford it.

Please. Please. Please educate yourself on this these issues. The news media’s hands are tied on such issues. The open internet is one of the greatest and most unifying things to happen to our species and if the cost of that is a few pirates than I am okay with that.

If reading isn’t your thing then please watch this videos:

Clay Shirky: Why Sopa is a Bad Idea

Cory Doctorow: The Coming War on General Computing

*Warning: super nerdy

Jeremy Rifkin has written quite a few amazing books. His most recent book, The Empathic Civilization is a mind blower for sure. Jeremy breaks down how communication technology through history has informed how we empathize and from there he takes those thoughts in some amazing directions.

I Consult with a lot of churches so for the most part I don’t post a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk videos as my clients would be turned off by his colorful language. The good folks at ReMax were able to convince Gary to tone it down for this keynote (which if you’ve seen Gary enough you know how tough this must have been for him). Gary wrote The Thank You Economy last year and along with Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky it is the book I have recommended most to leaders in all industries this last year.

For the last 2 years or so I have been captivated by the Royal Society for the Arts and their Animate videos. They take what was originally a talking head in a room full of people and create a visual element that helps more visual learners (myself included). It makes learning what would normally be a boring subject, economics, ….well…learnable:

Go check out the RSA youtube channel.

On a funny tweet exchange this morning I clicked over to the SSA site again and I looked at the most popular names for the last 100 years and I was immediately blown away by the staying power of the top 5 names for both boys and girls.

With the exception of 1960, Michael is number 1 from 1954 to 1998 and has (and still is) been in the top 5 since 1949. The curious thing for me is when and why various names pop into the charts and become popular. For Example; Emma was the name of the baby that Rachel ‘gave birth’ to on Friends in May of 2002 and there is an immediate spike in the popularity of the name Emma. Emma is ranked number 13 for girls in 2001 but jumps to number 4 in 2002 and number 2 in 2003 (where it stays for 4 years).

Would the pervasiveness of social media have had an effect on spikes like Emma or on staying power of names like Michael (number 1 for 44 years) and Mary (Number one for 46 years)?

All cultural norms aside, my guess is Gen-x parents prefer individuality for their kids more than baby boomer parents in regards to names, I think we will see some changes in the way this data trends year over year as a result of new media and our expanded social consciousness. That is to say, as expecting parents see babies being born in their expanded social circles via new media to parents who have chosen the same name they had in mind they may be likely to change their mind. Yes, Adele will be a popular name this year (not in top 1000 in 2009; number 908 for 2010) but my guess is that it won’t have the staying power of Emma (top 4 the last 8 years).

I’m intrigued by this data and how new media may affect it. It gives a measurable queue to the reach of new media in our culture.

What are your predictions?

We can look for ways to innovate or we can spend our last years as an organization trying to make a better mouse trap.

Our first reaction was to try and ‘make a better mouse trap’ by attempting to step up the quality of our content in order to garner more eyes. It’s clear that in a sea of content of that magnitude you can only do so much in terms of quality, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how good your stuff is if you don’t have the channel to distribute it to the right people. Justin Beiber isn’t any good, no one would argue with that, yet ‘he’ has moved millions of albums because the channel was already there via a big record label. That local bar band could probably do the same if they were given the same channel.

Building a channel

So how does an individual or organization build a channel? It’s all about context my friend. I don’t care what the door to door salesmen is selling. I don’t care if it will actually change my life. All I know is that I don’t know you and you interrupted me while I was watching cat videos on YouTube working on a complex spreadsheet. I just want you to go away!

When my friends Ramy or Randy tell me that restaurant X has really good food, I take it very seriously. We  have shared many a fantastic meal and there is a lot of context to give weight to what they say. If a perfect stranger recommends an eatery, I have a much more limited context by which to judge their opinion.

You build a channel by building relationships, not simply creating content…even if it’s great content.

If you and I go back and forth on Twitter on  a weekly basis in a casual manner we are  likely to click on each other’s links that we post. The same goes for Facebook or blogs. If I am engaging your content you are much more likely to click through to mine because we have developed some context. Sounds like real life doesn’t it?

The thing is we all know this instinctively yet we throw it out the window when it comes to new media.

Steps to take now

1. Focus on who is here now
   Don’t try and increase your followers, subscribers, attendees or anything like that, invest in who is already there. Take a stroll through your twitter stream and hit up some people in an every day way, not with pitches to check out your content. Post a blog asking for feedback on what content the users would like to see. Schedule time at your next event to get out of the ‘green room’ and shake hands with as many people as possible.
2. Listen
   You’re a communicator by nature, that’s why you read my blog, but you have to focus and schedule time to listen. Users are growing more and more accustomed to having a voice because of new media and if you don’t listen than they will tune into somewhere else where they feel they are being heard…even if just a little bit. Spend more time reading tweets, comments, posts and other content by your users than crafting your own for one week and you will be blown away by the effect.
3. Connect people
   There is a good chance your audience is dispersed throughout your city or the world and they could probably stand to have a bit more contact with each other. ReTweet some stuff from those you follow, not just the trending links of the day, but more every day real life stuff. Post a blog linking to some of the posts those in your community are creating. Share stories at your next event of some of the cool things those in the community are doing (even if it doesn’t directly serve the immediate context of the gathering)