Sunday School Technology – not just flannelgraphs anymore

August 31, 2007 in Uncategorized

Some background: In September of last year I started a blog for my Adult Bible Fellowship (i.e. sunday school) class at church. My hope and the hope of the teachers of the class was that the blog would be a good way to have a conversation with those in and outside the class in between our weekly meetings on Sunday mornings. While it hasn’t been a total bust, we haven’t had the response that any of us expected (though honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect). The following are my thoughts based on an email I wrote to one of the teachers asking if there was anything he could do to get people to use the blog more.

I’m posting an edited version of the email here to explain a bit more about why our class has a blog and to see if anyone has any thoughts that might be beneficial.

I was prompted to finally get this posted because of Adam Hoagland’s Facebook post today.

Executive summary: Don’t worry about the comments being low, keep blogging. We probably need a better tool for the kind of potential for discussion we’re envisioning. I don’t know what that tool is yet. We all need to work through this together.

I’ve really been trying to figure out how we’re to use a lot of this technology and ways of communicating in a God honoring and glorifying way. This is because of the Builders Blog but also because of the redesign of the main church web site.

I don’t have any hard stats to back it up, but I think most blogs have a very low commenter to readership ratio. So the blogs that have a lot of comments most likely have an exponentially higher readership. We’re targeting a comparatively much lower number of readers, so we shouldn’t expect a lot of comments (unless we change what we’re doing, see below).

I don’t know that I really realized it when we started the blog, but I think there are two separate and possibly incongruent goals.

1. Having a publicly available archive of what we have been up to and talking about. This benefits those inside our church and outside, those wishing to join and those who might just be encouraged by reading but have no plans of joining (i.e. they are outside the Lafayette area).
2. Having a way to foster conversation and learning outside of Sunday morning. Again, I think this benefits those inside the class and outside. The best example of this is the translation discussion. The arguments made were fairly well thought out and insightful. At least in part I think because people had time to do research and think through a complex topic. They aren’t able to do this on a Sunday morning.

One note about the translation discussion. We had a lot of comments (a lot at least for us). But I was wondering how many individuals we actually involved. I counted 14 people that made 45 comments. The encouraging thing is that we had involvement from all the different types of groups we’re discussed reaching.

Builders, Builders Teachers, Other KSBCers, Outsiders

One theory I have is that the “openness” we have with the blog fits #1 perfectly but hurts #2.

In the same way that our church has open events (Sunday morning services, fellowship activities, picnics, 5k runs, etc.) and closed events (small groups, one-on-one meetings, theology class, etc.), we need online tools appropriate for each need.

So the comments are low and will remain low because people are leery about commenting without fully thinking through things. They don’t want to have their half-baked ideas available for all the world to see now and into the future. And I can’t blame them. While some people do need to step out of their comfort zones, it might not be wise for any of us to step that far out. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a place for people in our class to discuss their half-baked ideas to help get them fully baked.

I see the 3 commitment level that KSBC promotes in the offline world, taking shape in the online world like this (I split up Sunday morning into two pieces):

· Sunday morning services -> ksbc.net (large community, I don’t know everyone and not everything applies to me)

· ABF -> Builders blog and email list (smaller community, I know most people, most things impact me in some way)

· Small groups -> Email list (Intimate community, open, I can share anything) – there are some new tools that could be a better fit for this area (youversion.com, closed facebook group, mychurch.org).

· Serving -> Personal blogs, IM, facebook, myspace, twitter, youtube, SecondLife, World of Warcraft, etc – you talk about your faith, your church, represent Christ, etc. in whatever online environment you happen to belong to.

All of the above though, assumes people are even regularly checking the site. This is not a problem for me. I’ve been using an RSS reader for about 3 years now and it’s the only way I keep up with things that are going on. I hardly ever check the builders blog in my browser. My RSS reader tells me whenever there is something new available. So that there was a lull for a couple months wasn’t a problem. When you made the post on August 2, I knew that same day even though I hadn’t been to the site in months (other than to post the retreat info). You described it as hip or savvy. I think I like those terms, I would have described it as geeky. So maybe I just need to teach people how to use an RSS reader and we’ll pray they get in the habit of using it.

One thing people probably already have the habit of is regularly checking their email. There is an option to subscribe to the blog via email instead of RSS. So maybe I just need to sign everyone on our email list up for the blog. Though I think email is losing a lot of its effectiveness because of spam and email getting used for everything. So our message gets lumped in with all that.

Some people will wonder then why do I have to subscribe to the blog AND the email list? The benefit of the blog over the email list is that it provides a historical archive for someone new to the class to catch up in addition to the “openness” I mentioned above. The benefit of the email list over the blog is the more private nature where we can share things like prayer requests, contact information, coordinate schedules, etc. So it’s just a matter of you deciding is the information I have to get out more appropriate for the blog or for the email list.

Another thing I want to encourage you teachers to do is more things like Matt’s I-35 collapse post. I didn’t comment and I probably should have, but it was a reminder to me of two things. First that this very national, somewhat distant tragedy hit very close to home with someone I know pretty well and I hadn’t made that connection. I don’t know why when I heard Minneapolis I never thought to drop Matt an email to say “Hey, you know anybody involved with the bridge collapse I could pray for?” I probably overlook those types of things a lot. Second, the actual content of the post was a valuable and timely reminder. The blog isn’t restricted by a number of words or time like our Sunday morning meetings. So please, whatever is laid on your heart but isn’t appropriate or can’t wait for Sunday morning, use the blog. Another side note, I wish PDW, Paul Briggs, and a lot of the other leaders in our church had their own blogs (a personal blog or for a ministry of theirs) for this very type of thing. I’d like to have their thoughts in context with John Piper’s, Matt Borg’s, and the national news media. It is encouraging to see that current and former church interns Jared, Adam, Ben, and Dave all have blogs. Now if we could just get the older more experienced church leaders to blog. John Piper can blog, our former assistant pastor Dave Cortner has a blog, so I don’t think there is any age limit

And of course, some people just don’t care enough to think about God outside of Sunday morning. That’s a way bigger issue that can’t be solved by technology. We need God to put a passion in their hearts for Himself.