All posts in Story 09

Drew Goodmanson & Cynthia Ware :: Story

by Tim Schraeder on 10/29/2009 in Story 09 with 3 Comments

Social Media Pulse

What are churches current social media patterns?

  • We are living in a world people dreamed of.
  • There used to only be a computer at work… then it went home… then to your lap… now to your hand.
  • Mobile ubiquity, where everyone has a phone, presents challenges and opportunities for the church.
  • There’s an embedded value system in social media [public/participatory, new media].
  • There’s value in it that it’s instant.
  • Everyone is an equal creator… it’s user-generated content.
  • We’d rather buy something someone tells us about than what we are told by businesses or corporations.
  • Users have a voice and are able to generate content.
  • In a relationship economy, what people say matters deeply.
  • We now have greater accessibility to information.
  • Churches need to move from having “please have your phone off” signs to “please have your phone on” signs.
  • The media is affecting our small group communities and the way that they interact.
  • We’ve torn down the boundaries of distance; there’s now a worldwide conversation going on that anyone can participate in.
  • The definition of “presence” is changing.
  • We HAVE to think through these things theologically.
  • Is physical presence necessary for you to be a part of and “be” the church.
  • Social media allows customization [personalization].
  • One size does not fit all … [MySpace, my reviews, my favorites, etc.]
  • My can be consumer oriented, but it reflects the fact that media is in the hands of every person and every person has the ability to create media.
  • Everyone is a content producer.
  • We now watch TV on our own terms [TiVo].
  • New generations are being raised with these new ideas embedded in their everyday interactions.
  • As technology becomes cheaper and more effective, the Church is confronted with one of the greatest opportunities along with one of the greatest challenges of how to steward it.
  • The Men of Issachar were able to see the times and were able to know what to do.
  • Let’s go to the next level… let’s find out what we are capable of doing and how are we able to frame it in a Biblical context?
  • The word of our testimony is the critical story we have that’s a powerful conduit [Christianity is viral] to reach someone we may have not been able to reach any other way.
  • We’ve moved to a digital age.
  • It will be normal for us to connect online, first and then meet in person.
  • 43% of churches say social media is one of the most effective ways for them to communicate and engage with people.
  • Church websites are the front doors to churches.
  • 77% of people say the church website was an important part of why they chose to go to church.
  • If people can’t connect to your website they may not go to your church.
  • People make judgements about a church based on what the church communicates across their website.
  • It’s a missiological issue.
  • John 17:18
  • Facebook is the 4th largest nation in the world if you look at the number of people that are on it.
  • Non-Christians do not go to your website.
  • Your website is primarily visited by believers looking for information about churches.
  • 20% of all data people are accessing on church websites is information for new visitors… that’s a significant portion where you should invest your time.
  • Use the web to help people new into the church to get deeper into community.
  • Your web strategy should be looked at as an Internet Presence Management.
  • What are you communicating online?
  • How are you connecting to where people are talking and engaging?
  • Where are you present? Where are you absent?
  • Who is responsible for your church’s online presence?
  • What does it mean to be the Church online?
  • How do you define presence? What’s your theology of presence?
  • We need to recognize that participatory media is decentralized.
  • It’s unregulated.
  • We have a lack of control.
  • We have to look deeper at our theology.
  • A mobile, extended presence can be used missionally.
  • Is virtual community real community?
  • What is Biblical community?
  • We need to define Biblical community before we define online community and if it’s possible to have church online
  • We need to ask if we can use an online presence to build real life community?
  • We need to intently be on the internet, it’s a mission field.
  • We, the Church, are called to be counter-culture… what does that mean at this technological crossroads?
  • We are willing to be transparent online, but vulnerability is not often seen online.

Top Social Media Sites

  1. Facebook
  2. Twitter
  3. Private Member Portals [ MemberHub, Monk, Tangle, Unifyer, etc ]
  4. GoogleGroups
  5. MySpace
  • Greatest needs online: events, post prayer requests, get connected, finding small groups and ways to connect throughout the week, integration with their church website and resource sharing.
  • Churches are wrestling with how to use participatory technologies.
  • The Cobblestone Community Network is a tool that’s been developed to help churches have private communication that’s integrated into social media channels.
  • If you don’t set a strategy you’re going to have a difficult time pulling it together later.
  • What is your strategy for the community online?
  • Pick a horse.
  • If you don’t lead your people, they will find their own way and go their own direction.
  • This is something we need to pay attention to but we don’t need to know the mechanics of it; you can find volunteers or someone on staff to help manage this.
  • Things are easier than they were before.
  • There are challenges and effort required but it’s more centered on your strategy.
  • Let people tell you how they want to be contacted… be platform neutral.
  • Let people choose how the content gets to them.

Kevin Sterner :: Story

by Tim Schraeder on 10/29/2009 in Story 09 with No comments

Kevin is the Creative Lead for Catalyst Conferences and Founder of Bradpoet, a design, branding, and storytelling agency.

  • This stage is too big for me but it’s not too big for my God.
  • The devil does everything to push us towards anonymity and indifference.
  • We serve a creative God.

  • God’s story is being told in letters too big for some of us to see.
  • Ephesians 1:18 – may the eyes of our heart be enlightened…
  • We need to aspire to be more.
  • We are all storytellers.
  • God is not in the business of selling Himself.
  • God does not sell beautiful Apple products in clunky Microsoft packaging.
  • Our God is in the business being excellent.
  • He’s in the business of differentiation.
  • He’s in the business of telling compelling stories.
  • The Gospel is the most compelling story ever told.
  • The cross is the most recognized symbol in the world.

Convincing vs Compelling

  • There’s a difference between being convicing and compelling.
  • Being convicing uses the power of persuasion to get into people’s minds.
  • Being compelling uses excellence and causes people le to be drawn to you in their own minds.
  • People are sold, but it’s in their own minds.
  • Are you, or your churches, being a “me” monster when you’re telling your story?

Story Sequencing

Impression – Brand Identity + Brand Story

  • Story is going on all the time, going on over the lifespan of our communications.
  • We have an up-front responsibility in the process.
  • Excellence has stopping power; story has staying power.
  • The responsibility of brand identity is getting people stopped in their tracks.
  • When you do something with excellence, it stops people… they notice.
  • Your brand identity is not a logo, it’s anything that touches people that represents who you are.
  • Story has staying power.
  • Story’s responsibly is to draw people in.

Brand Identity

  • Brand Identity creates an impression; Brand Story creates intrigue.
  • Story needs to take us on a journey and create transcendence.

Brand Experience

  • The Brand Experience allows people to experience, to taste and see.
  • When we do that, we pay off our promise.
  • We deliver what we said we would.
  • Brand Experiences surprise and delight.
  • Exceed expectations.

Brand Association

  • Customers internalize how they feel about when they first met you
  • Branding is building relational trust in storytelling.
  • Are you truthful? Are we giving what we promised?
  • Are you trustworthy?
  • Are you temporary? We want to see relationships go the distance… we want to be a part of something we believe will be lasting.
  • Branding manages and challenges perceptions.
  • Read  Blue Ocean Strategy
  • We can create uncontested market space.
  • You can’t tell a story without good assets.
  • We need to use words that have the power to move people, re-create imagination.
  • “I’m on a personal mission to rid church logos with fish, crosses, and globes…”
  • You need a brand that can stand beside any other brand and tell a beautiful story of what God is doing through what you are doing.
  • Brochures are pre-experiences… not just paper and ink.
  • People don’t get excited about copy.
  • You can’t effectively tell stories unless you can effectively document stories.
  • Besides a brand consultant you need a brand photographer.
  • You won’t get what you need out of stock photography.

We are creating the image of the living God for the world to see… we are telling His Story!

  • If you focus on the problem you will never see the solution. – Patch Adams
  • Don’t see what everyone else is seeing, see what people are afraid to see.
  • Look at the world differently every day.
  • We have a doubting audience.
  • Do something unexpected.
  • Get people’s attention.
  • In the end, you’ll be branded.
  • We serve an excellent God who wants us to look past problems/conflict and see His Story and retell it in a way that’s irrresistable.

Story :: Skye Jethani

by Tim Schraeder on 10/29/2009 in Story 09 with 1 Comment
  • This conference is really about communication.
  • We are telling stories.
  • On Sunday morning when we step into the pulpit, we have a choice.
  • We can choose to help people make it through life better.
  • Or, you can help them see another world.
  • You can help them recognize a parellel reality.
  • You can illuminate a Kingdom they say the believe but rarely have seen.
  • You have a choice to educate or illuminate.
  • You can inform or inspire.
  • You can teach or you can preach.
  • When people come to church, they believe there’s something outside of this world.
  • People are looking for evidence of the other world.
  • They want to feel and experience the transcendent.
  • That image is veiled by consumer practicality.
  • We’re taught that preaching is all about conveying Biblical information.
  • Pastors/leaders have more Biblical knowledge and our job is to communicate it to people who don’t know it as well.
  • We preach information.
  • We always preach practical.
  • We give how-to’s, 3 points, etc.
  • The instructional model of preaching is an utter failure.

2 Fatal Flaws of Instructional Preaching

1 – It doesn’t work.

  • The worst way to teach anyone is by gathering large groups of people and lecturing them for 40 minutes.
  • People don’t retain information.
  • Lecturing to audiences is not an effective way to communicate.
  • Small, relational community environments is the best place for teaching to happen.

2 – It doesn’t challenge people’s perceptions of reality.

  • People have spent 6 days marinating in the both of the world of consumerism.
  • This worldview shapes everything about us.
  • We have a consumer worldview that teaches us we are the center of the universe and that everything [jobs, marriages, etc] revolves around us and value is found not in what things are, but in what they bring me.
  • It teaches that the goal of life is to satisfy our desires.
  • It teaches us there is a pill, program, or person to solve their problems.
  • It reduces Jesus Christ to a commodity.
  • We have spent decades convincing
  • We’ve inoculate people to the Gospel.
  • We’ve made it our mission in life to make people feel like Jesus Christ is the relevant answer to their unmet needs.
  • We’ve made Him an end to our means, not an end.
  • We’ve made Jesus into the equivalent of a DuctTape, WD40 Combo pack… just about all you need to fix anything.
  • We’ve made Him into an instrument to fulfill our desires.
  • Christianity is the most irrelevant but most beautiful worldview.
  • The call of the Christian life is to deny yourself and follow Him.
  • We’re not challenging the presuppositions people have, we are just reinforcing them.
  • People who are walking in darkness don’t just need a cane to help them cope; they need to see a Great Light.
  • They don’t need to see how to live in this broken world, they need to see another world, another reality.

Teaching is important; but when you give people how-to’s, they have no vision for why they should.

VIM – Vision, Intention, Means

  • Teaching how-to fulfills the Means
  • When people have no vision – the reality of God’s Kingdom – they won’t implement the means.
  • When people have a means and no vision, it’s like unused home gym equipment.
  • When you have a vision, the means take of itself – when there’s a will, there’s a way.
  • A culture in which you have a ton of means and no vision is the culture of the church today.
  • It’s a generation that has more access to teaching and Christian resources than ever before, and yet has a moral decline.
  • We don’t lack instruction, we lack a vision for why it matters.
  • Our people do not intend to follow Christ.
  • Nothing in the Church is challenging their consumer values, it’s just reinforcing them.

How Do We Help Them See the Other Side?

  • When the Kingdom of God is preached, it breaks the darkness of the world and let’s people see a vision of another reality, a place of peace, righteousness, wholeness and justice.
  • We get enraptured in this beauty.
  • It doesn’t happen through instruction, it happens through inspiration.
  • It happens when we don’t see preaching as an act of informing but an act of inspiring.
  • There’s an alternative way to preach, preaching as illumination model.

The Illumination Model

  • Targets the imagination.
  • Turns on the lights.
  • Helps people see the reality.
  • Solves the problems of remembering and challenging.
  • Recognizes there’s a difference between preaching and teaching.
  • In the NT the most common word for preaching meant “to announce.”
  • Jesus came “preaching” the Kingdom of heaven was at hand.
  • The word of teaching in the NT was “to instruct.”
  • They are used differently.
  • Jesus told His disciples to go out and PREACH, then He told them to TEACH.
  • Teaching expects you to be competent with a set of knowledge.
  • You don’t have to know jack to preach.
  • Preaching is not about conveying information; it’s about announcing a new reality you have experienced.
  • Peter and the disciples has experienced the Kingdom of God through the presence of Christ.
  • Preaching is announcing flight 500 from Denver has landed; teaching explains how and why a plane landed.
  • I can’t tell you how, but I can tell you it happened.
  • Preaching requires experiential knowledge of the reality of the Kingdom of God.
  • Our job is to help people see the reality of the Kingdom of God illuminated through the ancient words.
  • Teaching engages intellect; preaching is an experience that illuminates.
  • Preaching alters our vision – it helps us see beyond the darkness.
  • Nothing Jesus taught made sense until people had their way of thinking altered… once you see the alternate reality, it makes sense.
  • Once you see the Kingdom, things that don’t make sense, connect.
  • Their vision of reality has to be altered.
  • Vision has to come before instruction.
  • Most of the people in our churches don’t need more Biblical teaching, they need their minds set free from the mindset of consumerism to see the beauty of the reality of the Kingdom of God.
  • Jesus told people to “go back and tell what you have seen.”
  • That’s our call… to help people see the reality we have seen.
  • To help people see with new eyes.
  • Our role isn’t to help people cope, our job is to help them see what’s unseen.
  • We do that through our lives, stories, experiences and illuminating the ancient Scriptures.
  • An awful lot of the verbs in the NT Greek are in the present tense.
  • It’s not “Jesus went to Jerusalem…” it really is “Jesus goes to Jerusalem…”
  • It was a literary device used to help the listener enter into the reality of the story.
  • Don’t just share information, lift people’s vision.

What are you doing on Sunday morning?

  • Are you getting people to DO the Christian life, or to SEE the reality of the Kingdom so they will want to DO the Christian life?
  • We need to ravish people with the power, beauty and wonder of His Kingdom.

Preach in season and out of season, don’t just teach. Don’t just instruct, inspire. Don’t just educate, but take up your divine calling and illuminate.

Story :: Donald Miller

by Tim Schraeder on 10/28/2009 in Story 09 with 3 Comments
Donald Miller left home at the age of 21, traveling across the country until he ran out of money in Portland, where he lives today. He wrote the New York Times Bestseller Blue Like Jazz and started The Belmont Foundation, which is recruiting 10,000 mentors from 1,000 churches as a response to fatherlessness in America. His newest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, shares how to apply the principles of writing great stories to real life.
  • A good story has a character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
  • What’s meaningful in a story is meaningful because it’s meaningful in life.
  • Story teaches us what is beautiful, what’s worth dying for and what’s worth sacrificing for.
  • Story has an incredible power to engage the human mind.
  • There’s a difference between music and noise.
  • We engage narrative differently than the language of experience.
  • Narrative teaches us what we should be living for.
  • Lists of values outside of narrative are meaningless.
  • Stories in the Bible don’t stop and tell you what the moral of the story is.
  • The story is ongoing.
  • We sit down with the text and ask, “what’s in this for me?
  • What if God was just in it?
  • What if it’s just a relationship with Him that we’re meant to engage in?
  • Story adjusts our moral compass.
  • We learn by living a story.
  • It’s possible to live a good story.
  • All of the elements of stories are conditional.
  • Characters are important, but they don’t have to be perfect.
  • Characters have to sacrifice of themselves for the benefit of others to make a good story.
  • Oftentimes our stories are selfish and self-serving.
  • Success doesn’t tell a very compelling story.
  • A character is not who they feel they are, think they are, or who they want to be.
  • A character is only what they actually do.
  • What we do tells a story about who we are to the people around us.
  • The story we’re telling ourselves is often different than story we’re telling other people.
  • We have to want something.
  • If the protagonist doesn’t want something, the story can’t start.
  • What story are you telling with your life?
  • A story cannot be meaningful unless it involves conflict.
  • We are taught that there’s not supposed to be conflict [ by the media and in church ].
  • What does it mean to be “who God designed you to be?”
  • We are born into conflict.
  • We cannot reverse the role of conflict in our lives.
  • Conflict is here to stay.
  • Dark conflict entered into our lives as a result of the Fall.
  • God created a protagonist in us.
  • We desire what we cannot have.
  • Conflict is beautiful.
  • Conflict is the only way a character changes.
  • The only way we can change is through pain.
  • It’s true in a story and in real life.
  • Conflict adds value to what we are trying to obtain.
  • The Christian worldview has been hijacked by commercialism.
  • It’s robbing of us of great stories.
  • We need to look at conflict differently and share our stories, embrace conflict.
  • If Christians could have a courageous attitude toward conflict, we could change the world.
  • In story, there’s a desire for a climax, an act 3.
  • In one action, conflict is over.
  • The desire for climax is fascinating.
  • We are a protagnoist… conflict has to take place to give life meaning.
  • There’s always been a desire for conflict to go away.
  • It manifests itself like wishful thinking in our lives.
  • We’re taught conflict goes away through the climactic act of Jesus.
  • The an inference is that Jesus is the climax and an end to our suffering.
  • Jesus was not the climax.
  • The truth is, in our theology, our conversion is not the climax.
  • Conflict just gets worse.
  • Can you imagine an infomercial with the Apostle Paul trying to sell Jesus?
  • There’s a difference between the Biblical epic and the story we are taught.
  • We’ve filtered our theology through commercial messages and lost the true power of our story.
  • We are in Act 2 right now.
  • Act 3 takes place at the wedding feast of the Lamb.
  • When we die and are reunited with Christ.
  • Paul didn’t sell Jesus as a product to take pain away, he talked about HOPE.
  • What we have is incredible hope.
  • The number one way America consumes stories is not through film, television or books, the number one way we consume stories is through each other.
  • Tell beautiful stories with your lives.
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