IT and evangelism

Scobleizer (Robert Scoble, a technical evangelist employed by Microsoft) is the most prolific blogger i've ever come across. When i have the time, i try and read most of what he publishes... although this can be dangerous, you tend to lose whole hours of your life :-)

This well-written post of his struck a note for me - Ten evangelism and IT lessons from one of America's biggest churches. I've been pondering evangelism using IT for awhile now... i truly believe it's essential for the modern church to use... eventually I want to put up our church sermons online, for a start, and a church website is often a great way to reach people without putting any pressure on them.

Dallas Fellowship Church (i didn't think much of their website) sounds extremely impersonal to me - and more like a technical paradise than a Christian one - but then i'm used to a slightly smaller setup :-) I honestly don't see how the focus could be on God in a place like this... but Scoble's article has several very valid points to make about effective use of technology today.

"While most of the computers at this church are running Windows, there are a couple of Macs (their radio show engineer was editing on a Mac when I was given a tour), most of the video is running on a Windows front end, but the back end is an SGI set of computers, along with a stack of computers running Linux that do the hard-core video rendering. "Why did you use Linux for that?" I asked. Storch answered that most the bleeding-edge video rendering apps were designed for Linux. Lesson nine: don't be religious about technology, choose what gets the job done best for the least amount of money and staff time."

Be sure to check out the article comments too... with an open mind, as usual. My favourite two comments:

"I believe this is known as syncretism: take the local belief structure (be it a winter solstice holiday with an evergreen tree or a belief that television or a computer is the most important thing to watch) and twist it so it appears to have a religious method. Now you know why Christianity has been so successful.
mb • 6/8/04; 2:35:17 AM

On that I agree. What a church website tho, I felt as if the dot.com boom had never died. Eye Candy forever, and took me forever to find the Statement of Faith, seems mainline Protestant with some Southern Penacostal-styled Vineyard Movement Redux, TBN Cheese Whiz with some happy happy Disneyland touches thrown-in. And the online giving part strikes me as amazingly crass. I do notice mass focus on Home Teams, ironic unto itself. The big needs to divide to little to survive, I dunno tho, with 19,000 people you'd be just a number, or a database entry, with SQL Server backend. This is church forged by MBAs; God as a corporation. And quite nice when churches can develop all that MSFT backend for nearly free.
Christopher Coulter • 6/8/04; 2:40:28 AM