Collide Magazine

Online Community At LifeChurch.tv

Scott McClellan - Originally posted Monday, February 16, 2009 -

When LifeChurch.tv announced in 2008 that Tony Steward was coming onboard as their Online Community Pastor, we were immediately intrigued. To our knowledge (and to the knowledge of the LifeChurch.tv team), Steward is the first person to hold that title on a church staff, but our guess is that he won’t be the last. To find out more about LifeChurch.tv’s definition and goals for online community, we spoke with Internet Campus Pastor Brandon Donaldson and Steward. Donaldson and Steward’s online ministry strategy is fueled equally by their insight and passion for using available technology to reach people. The effects of their work this year and in years to come will surely challenge preconceived notions of what ministry and community are and how they’re facilitated. Whether you’re sold on the idea of online community or you remain a skeptic, you need to hear this pair’s heart and plan for the work they’re doing.

COLLIDE: How do you define community, and what does it look like in your context? What signs do you want to see that will tell you you’re building a healthy community?

Tony Steward: Social networks have existed for a long time. Your local rotary is a social network and it can become a community where people gather and have relationships—they get to know each other and communicate, they have presence with each other on a regular basis that builds that community. When you first walk into the rotary you’re meeting new people and making connections, and eventually, you’re a part of that community because you get to know people, you get to be known, you establish relationships, and you’re consistent about being together.

In social networks, and as you’re building community online, it’s the same thing. It’s a network of interpersonal relationships where you’re getting to know people, where you’re being known, and where you consistently gather. What’s cool about the Church is that when you talk about biblical community, it’s then focused on the things the Bible tells us to do when we’re getting together as the Church—the edification of believers, evangelism, fellowship, and discipleship. That can all happen as you communicate, as you gather, as you have presence, as you feed into each other. The Web is very relational now, and you can know people and be known through those media.

The whole point of Twitter is having a presence in someone’s life in the everyday. Twitter and some of those micro-media formats give you the ability to be present in someone’s life because you can see what is happening in the parts of their day that you wouldn’t know unless you were actually present. So what we’d like to see when we build community, what we’d like to see come out of that, is belonging—where people feel like they belong to something that brings value to their life and they can bring value to A community that feeds into each other with those relationships and those values is now possible online.

Brandon Donaldson: The thing about the Internet Campus we realized is it’s not all the power that’s in the Internet and these tools that we could use as a church. All these valid communities that are happening are paths along the way to what we believe helps people be fully devoted followers of Christ. That’s why we brought Tony on—he’s really good at systems and putting those things in place in an idea-driven world. We realized we were missing that.

We have the potential of touching many people with content online, and yet we’re not going to get those people to join a LifeGroup. We hope that’s where they end up, but we’re missing some of those touch points that, hopefully, the Internet can provide. That’s very valid and very powerful.

Steward: And when you talk about Internet language, we don’t consider community to be fans, followers, or subscribers. Those are people who’ve just checked us out. The LifeChurch Facebook Page has about 1,500 people who’ve become a fan of it. Is that a community? Not in any way. No one’s engaged. When you’re talking about social media and Internet metrics, it used to be pageviews, click-throughs, and conversion rates – and those still apply as part of the conversation – but when you look at trying to measure success online in community, it’s all about engagement. How engaged are people in what you’re doing? Do they respond back? Are they submitting their own content? Also, what kind of influence are you having? Are people trying to do the same thing?

That’s what was exciting about LifeShare, which we did about a month ago. People really caught on and people were doing their own LifeShare prayer vigils with their friends, telling their stories with people physically and virtually present. Community spontaneously happened as people grabbed that idea.

We’re trying to measure our success by engagement and influence. Are we helping to have a positive influence on how people are living out their faith online? Also, how engaged are the people we’re connecting to? The pageview metric isn’t a community metric – it’s how many people are responding and how much feedback we’re getting.

COLLIDE: This isn’t scientific, but when I googled “online community pastor” I could only find reference to Tony. To me, that implies you’re in somewhat uncharted waters with what you’re trying to do. Is that scary? Is that exciting?

Steward: It’s scary because of the visibility of it. People are going to look at the mistakes we make or the success we have, and they might think something we’re trying as an experiment is the only way to do it. What’s cool about being at LifeChurch is it’s an open and authentic conversation, from staff to everybody else. That’s a value that exists here. It’s cool to be here and have the opportunity to make mistakes or have success, and then be able to talk very openly about it with people. There are plenty of Internet campuses out there and guys doing ministry, and I’d guess that for most of those places they’re doing all of it.

Donaldson: You’re right; it’s a new position. I think this begins to reshape ideas around the Internet Campus. Everybody thinks of all these things, but to actually put someone in that position says this is becoming something that is all about Internet communities and how we can really be a factor there. That’s a new idea. I’m excited to see what happens with that, and I think it will begin to change the face of what an Internet Campus is, whether we fail or succeed.

For more about LifeChurch.tv, visit www.lifechurch.tv. Keep up with Brandon and Tony at internet.lifechurch.tv and www.tonystewardblog.com.