Collide Magazine

The 21st-Century Potluck: Web 2.0 & the Church

Kevin D. Hendricks - Originally posted Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Church is all about community. Fellowship, outreach, and the classic potluck—they're all built on community. So it only makes sense for churches to explore the 21st-century potluck: Web 2.0.

What Is Web 2.0?
OK, so what the heck is Web 2.0? The term was coined by O'Reilly Media in 2003 and refers to a second iteration of the Internet that's built on collaboration and sharing. It's social networking like MySpace, it's collaborative writing like Wikipedia. It's even about getting content off your isolated desktop and onto a shareable, broadly accessible platform (i.e., you're no longer chained to your desktop). There's even a vague sense of technical and/or design styles that make something Web 2.0 (clean, lots of white space, curved edges, RSS, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, etc.).

You'll get a different definition of Web 2.0 depending on whom you ask. But it's not that the Internet has changed (you don't need to upgrade to Internet 2.0 like you might need to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista)—instead, how we use the Internet is changing.

The simplest way to understand Web 2.0 is that it has given power to the people. While Web 1.0 was all about passive surfing, Web 2.0 is about letting everyone contribute—whether that contribution is written opinion (blogs), feedback (comments), video (YouTube), photos (Flickr), connection and community-building (MySpace/Facebook/LinkedIn), or knowledge (Wikipedia).

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More than technology or community, Web 2.0 is about a new frame of mind:

• Less is more
• Design matters
• It's OK to start small
• Mistakes happen
• Do it cheap
• Anyone can do it
• Share.

Web 2.0 is about decentralizing power and information and putting it in the hands of amateurs. And it's OK if they get something wrong or it's not as good as professionals would do it, simply because the sheer volume of information available makes up for a few deficiencies.

What Does This Mean for the Church?
And that's the money question, isn't it? Why should a busy pastor or church staff member care?

Because Web 2.0 has the power to connect disconnected people. Your pews are packed with people who don't know one another. Any church with multiple services knows the difficulty of people who attend the same church but have never seen one another. Community is one of the greatest things the church can provide—but it inevitably takes a while for people to connect with those sitting around them in the pews. Community takes a while to establish. Web 2.0 isn't instant community, but it helps jump-start community.

Because Web 2.0 can make your job easier. Conversely, it also can make your job harder by sucking up every second of free time you have. But the idea is that Web 2.0 enables the average person to get involved. You can empower the people in the pews and let them do some of the heavy lifting. Rather than having a page on your church website full of pictures taken by the staff and uploaded by the staff (a brain-numbing and time-consuming process), set up a Flickr group for your church and let anyone share their own pictures.

Because Web 2.0 is cheap. Getting other people involved is done by volunteers using free web applications to get work done—potentially allowing paid staff to do more important work. A critical aspect of Web 2.0 is the applications that have been developed. For example, Google Docs is essentially Microsoft Word as a website, and it's free. There are now online applications that mimic the functionality of every major piece of office software, and that can make your tech life a lot easier. Web 2.0 can be a godsend for the church planter who works in coffee shops and is constantly hopping computers by enabling him to store his data in spill-proof cyberspace instead of on a spill-prone laptop.

Your church is full of smart people who can contribute, so let them. It doesn't have to be just the staff who writes content for the church website. It doesn't have to be just the church photographer who snaps pictures. It doesn't have to be just the youth pastor who spreads the word about a last-minute summer baseball game.

Let's Get Practical
The best practical example is to go try it yourself and see what works, which is really the Web 2.0 ethos in a nutshell. Making Web 2.0 work for you means doing some work. And since it's all about sharing and collaboration, you can't force people to do it. Here are four tips to help get you started:

1) Determine Your Goal
What are you even trying to accomplish? Are you connecting people within your church? Are you reaching out to potential visitors? Are you trying to make it easier for visitors to find you? Are you just toying with new technology? Or all of the above? Knowing what you're trying to do can make it easier to figure out where to start.

2) Know Your Audience
If your church isn't online, don't bother. If people aren't using the Web, the church isn't likely to talk them into it. What you need is an audience already plugged in, which tends to be young people, especially college students, which makes Web 2.0 an ideal way to connect with the coveted twentysomething crowd.

3) Be Prepared to Fail
Just because you build it doesn't mean they'll come. And if they do come, they may mess up everything. Part of giving power to the people means they have a larger platform to share what they think, which means you may have some policing to do. Be aware of security and moderation measures and use them. But remember that giving up control is part of the deal—you need to find the balance.

4) Just Do It
Part of the whole Web 2.0 appeal is the amateur vibe. You don't have to be a pro, so don't worry about screwing it up. Just pick something small and give it a try:

• Start a blog—Post the weekly sermon (even better, post your reaction to it), talk about upcoming events, whatever works (The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch is a great place to start).
• Start a group—Pick a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook where a few members of your congregation already are and start a group to bring them together.
• Start a calendar and share events—Google offers a free calendar that others can subscribe to, or you can post events in social networking sites and invite your friends.
• Share photos—Set up a Flickr group for your church and encourage wannabe photographers to snap pictures at church events and add them to the group.
• Post videos to YouTube—If you have video, put it online—the sermon, event trailers, series videos, etc. For added fun, challenge the youth group to create a promo video for your church.

Web 2.0 may be a lot of hype. But the $1.6 billion Google spent to acquire YouTube suggests otherwise. Whatever your opinion, Web 2.0 is another tool the Church can either ignore, like so many others, or embrace and see what the fuss is about. Hopefully we will decide to participate in the 21st-century potluck, bring the best-tasting dish we can make, and enjoy the fellowship.

Kevin D. Hendricks is a freelance writer. Visit him at www.monkeyouttanowhere.com.