Blogging on Behalf of the Church
Seven Years Ago I proposed that Emmanuel could use a new website. At the time, I didn’t think engagement with current members was all that important. Small “family” sized congregations, with many members who don’t even own a computer wouldn’t see much benefit. At least, the current membership wouldn’t see a benefit. Websites at that point were more like fancy phone book entries. The pendulum had already swung quite a bit away from phone books and towards Google. It’s quicker and easier to get numbers, addresses, hours and more by simply typing the name in.
Those phone book entries come up in two ways.
The first is the optimistic: church shoppers. When someone new moves into the area and wants to find a church, they are most likely going to look online (or someone will look for them). You want the character of your congregation to be made clear to those people. In our case, “small,” Lutheran, rural, traditional, and so on. (I mark small with quotation marks because congregations in the United States are mostly about our size, but people still call 60-70 weekly worshipers “small”)
At the time I decided it would be fun to try something a little different. Rather than a Facebook feed that inundates members and community members who already “like” your page (and have probably made up their mind as to whether they will attend, have a relationship etc), put that sort of live feed on the website. Use rolling updates instead of a static phone book entry.
That was the purpose of this tumblr page. Tumblr, of course, has had its reputation as to which demographic will use it and what for. It’s been during this time, in fact, that pressure from Apple (I believe it was) prompted Tumblr to remove pornographic images from the site. Internet savvy people have raised an eyebrow at me when they noticed my choice of website host.
However, I’m not much of a mind to judge a whole platform by what some people put on it. Informative newspapers have inflammatory and ill-informed ‘letters to the editor.’ Facebook has had its scandals in the same period of time. Tumblr is a useful, free tool that addressed the task at hand.
It’s been more or less an unsuccessful experiment. I’ve been inconsistent in posting (both in frequency and content), sometimes intentionally, other times not. I was unaware that the automatic post-to-Facebook feature had stopped working, because I have months long periods where I don’t check Facebook. There’s been no good way to get feedback on these changes, disruptions, etc.
At one point, I saw that the audio of an Easter sermon I had posted had over 500 listens. That seemed to be the best indicator that SOMETHING was working. Church shoppers, I assumed, would listen to a sermon or two on the websites of churches in their area. So I switched to doing that.
That led to headache after headache. File size and audio length restrictions meant I had to post in multiple places. Posting online was always an after thought, so sometimes I would have to go back and re-record similar content without personal, private references. With more than one or two sermons posted, the counter never got very high anyway.
Things are different now, of course. In light of the pandemic related shut downs, I’ve had to post everything online. I’ve done so on Anchor.FM (so it appears on Spotify) as well as YouTube. That means the one thing this site seemed well equipped for is no longer serving that purpose.
There’s a second group of people who check the website though. This is the less optimistic views, because they’re looking us up for a specific function. Sure, sometimes that’s fine, like for a church dinner. Those people really are just looking for the phone book entry though. They aren’t researching a new church, most likely.
The evidence for that, for me, is when I get reports from Google on how many people searched our church, looked up directions, and clicked through to our website. Most of the time, it’s only a handful of people. Then, once or twice a year, because of a well attended wedding or funeral, the number skyrockets. Hundreds of people might look us up in the same week.
Today
Times have changed, and boy have they changed a lot.
Smart phones went from niche use cases, usually centered around messaging (e.g. Blackberry and Danger) to more versatile machines (e.g. iOS and Android). Mass market meant they got cheaper, simpler, and virtually everyone could find something these gadgets can do that their old gadgets could not.
I know that seems like a silly aside, a bit of a history lesson, but it means something changed for churches too. That idea that you may as well not bother with the Internet because many of your members aren’t on anyway has faded. “Many” may still be technically correct, but it’s misleading. Of our something like 180 people engaged in the church throughout the year, I count about 15 that do not use e-mail and do not have access to YouTube. If you expand the criteria to exclude those who text, the number gets down to less than 10. Okay, technically I’m including some people as “Internet users,” because they live with someone who is an Internet user (either a spouse or child).
We are a small, rural, “older” (again, probably about average, but people consider average older), and yet we’re overwhelmingly connected to the Internet.
The writing’s been on the wall for a couple of years. This way of doing the website may have worked if it was done right in the first place, but that time has passed.
The pandemic has forced the issue. For congregations, for members, for church shoppers, and on and on because it has affected everyone. My “maybe some day when I have the time...” aspirations about Internet use became “well, I have until Saturday to get this figured out.” Then (and now) “well, now is the time to experiment and try new things on here.”
That’s what this is.
This is our attempt to be all things to all people for “netizens” (that’s a portmanteau of Internet and citizens, by the way).
Instead of loosely using Facebook and Tumblr exclusively, we’re adding to the list.
YouTube - eServices (recorded versions derived from Sunday morning worship)
Anchor.FM - A podcasting host, which distributes the audio of sermons to many places. Look up “Paynes Point Pastor Preaching” on your platform of choice.
Weebly - Our landing page, www.emmanueloregon.com is now an aesthetically pleasing, relatively static, place to get just a glimpse into our church.
Going Forward
Church shoppers and those just looking for directions should have a more familiar experience. They’ll see a site that looks like, works like, and serves them like so many other small organization’s sites. There’s no scrolling through a variety of content, trying to “figure us out” from an audio sermon here, a picture gallery there, and a Pastor’s Piece newsletter article besides.
Emmanuel’s members and extended community can connect more extensively. Really, about as extensively as they want. When we begin to reopen, what it looks like exactly may change, but we will have something approximation of Sunday morning worship available online to those who are unable to be physically present. Current and past sermons will be easily available for those who want to catch up, go back hear something a second time, or maybe got a recommendation from a friend to take a listen.
Then we have this.
Since we haven’t had Bible Study, Circle, Confirmation, work days, and all the other gatherings, we haven’t had much room for conversations. I like to talk to the folks at Emmanuel about my reasoning and planning, etc, and I like to hear their feedback.
While this won’t facilitate feedback terribly well, it can get the ball rolling. The kind of things I would have taken the time to talk about throughout the week as I visited with the members, I am going to start posting about them here. This is a very long, self-referential example of that. It’s also the first installment of re-purposing this site as one of Tumblr’s intended purposes: a weblog.
At least for now, I will plan on writing something here about once a week or so. Those who get the newsletter in physical form will get this content along with the newsletter.
Hopefully it helps.
Pastor Andrew
