This is part two of my conversation with Cynthia Ware, Executive Director of the Center for Church Communication (CFCC).
Cynthia, What new strategies and ideas are you adding at CFCC?
We’re doing some thinking and planning about new directions.
We’ve redesigned our website.
We’ve launched the Church Marketing Directory, an exhaustive resource of all church communication professionals. Anyone can Submit Resources for the church marketing community.
Something we’re also excited about is “Suggest a Project,” where we come alongside individuals or groups to help them launch ideas that would really make an effective difference in change for church communications. We want to see people come together, connect, find resources and inspiration.
Tell me about your new “Firebrand” narrative.
The easiest way to think about our community is that we’re “A Firebrand of Communicators.” Our job is to see the Church grow in its ability to effectively and clearly communicate the gospel.
Communication models change with every generation. A communication approach that worked well four or five years ago may not work today. To go along with the narrative, we’ve created “Firestarter” to recognize churches that have ignited ideas and sparked brilliant communication. The hope is that this project will fan the flame and spread those creative embers to other church communicators.
The reason behind it all Gordon is that we know the church has a number of needs that aren’t being met yet.
Where does the church go from here in communications? What trends do you see?
The reality is, we’re a marketed to culture. The church’s competition is everything the media is barraging us with. We must pay attention, if we’re going to get anybody to notice. We will have to think about what our message is…from the billboard, to the sign in front of the church, to the flyers left at the local junior college announcing that we’re having a Bible study.
The values, the embedded code of ideology that the new media or participatory media embody, is very transforming to the Church at large.
Here’s a practical example.
If someone is on their way to the hospital, you hit Facebook with the need and you have five or ten people praying within minutes. We’ve never had that capability before.
The technology landscape is constantly shifting. What has your attention?
The specific technology that will have the most substantial effect on our future is the cell phone. Mobile ubiquity is really going to transform everything.
We still think of the phone as a phone. We’re going to be wearing it. It will be a camera recording our lives and the lives of those around us. It will be a projector, it will be a browser, it will be a video production device, a calculator.
And the type of ubiquity I’m talking about is coming fast. It’s really going to be the thing that gives us the most traction over the next decade or so.
According to Thom Rainer and Sam Rainer, authors of “essential Church,” more than two-thirds of young adults drop out of church between the ages of 18 and 22. Do you believe an understanding and use of technology could play a role in helping the Church reconnect with our youth?
We must come to terms with technology if we’re going to know how to most effectively reach the next generation. We need to understand how it is changing things for them.
The younger generation, and I’m talking about ten to fifteen year olds, don’t live in both worlds the way most of us do. They don’t know television with commercials. They only know “on demand.” My 15 year old daughter doesn’t know what the yellow pages is. She’s never heard of it. Fifteen hundred photos a week on their iPhones is not unusual. Kids sleep with their phones. The phone is their alarm. It’s their radio.
The web is becoming an intermediary to almost everything we do. And, it all has to do with communication.
The Church has survived without all these advancements. So what happens if it fails to catch up with the marketplace in its use of New Media?
We have before us what could be our greatest opportunity to use new media to reach the next generation; tomorrow’s leaders. Cynthia Ware
The Church is the bride of Christ. It can’t die off. That’s a given. We don’t HAVE to embrace technology to retain the life of the Church. The Church is bigger than any of the obstacles or limitations that we would put on it because it has the power of Jesus in it.
But we have an opportunity here and why would we want to miss it? It’s a tribe of Isaachar thing, “Leaders who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.”
Our whole heartbeat at the CFCC is to evangelize the idea and value of excellence in church communications for people that don’t know, so they don’t miss it.
Cynthia, thank you for giving us an in depth look at the great work the CFCC is doing. I have a feeling the best days for church communications are ahead.