An article making its way quickly around the web has pulled together many of the thoughts I’ve seen previously, but states them much clearer than I can recall. First, a quote:

In other words, your customers’ relationships with you are the only relationships you have as a business and you think a lot about them. But you’re one of a thousand things your customer thinks about in a week, and one of dozens of businesses. And they probably have their own ideas about how they want to engage with you (though they wouldn’t put it in those words) – assuming they think about you at all.

This applies even to Google or Facebook (which brings me to the title of this post). There’s lots of data showing the high proportion of online time that people spend using Facebook, and the high volume of web searches that they do using Google. Facebook and Google are important. But that doesn’t mean they’re everything.

Read the rest of Glass, Home and solipsism by Benedict Evans

There’s a bit more to it. This quoted section says all that needs to be framed for any conversation about mobile ministry (#mobmin). Specifically, just because the content is about faith, it doesn’t mean that people will be as into it as you are – even if you are so evangelitical that your mission wants to override whatever else is going on in their lives.

When you are living in a digital Bablyon, you can take the posture that you are leading the natives into understanding what makes the most sense for them. Or you can the posture that you are an equal part of the story, and what you have adds color to them, and what they expose adds color to you.

The biggest challenge with mobile ministry is sometimes that we have to pay attention to the fact that ministry means we participate with others in their story of faith. They aren’t users, nor our customers. If anything, the posture is that we serve them the right content or direction when its needed, so they see just how much grace was afforded to them.

Church Web Strategies is a website poking at the digital methods churches can use to improve sharing the Gospel online recently posed the posture of a church that goes digital by default. They posted four methods that can be taken forward:

• Announcements
• Bulletins
• Prayer Requests
• Feedback/Questionnaires
• Music Sharing

Read the rest of Be A Digital by Default Church at Church Web Strategies

There are some nice starts to ideas here, but having been through this topic several times in the past, there are definitely some considerations that each of these listed methods. For example, all of these methods start at what the church does administratively to push traditional messages. There’s nothing happening in these which are truly digitally native expressions of parts of the church, service, or community experience. And that’s because we are talking about folks who are not native to digital themselves – we’d need to look towards church communities where access to digital tech, not just use of it, is something that’s normal and embedded within all of the community. Digital as a layer only works for so long.

An example of digital native expressions could be a bible study where the outline and associated materials are shared first through SMS/MMS and social networking services between the attendees. Once they connect in person, the study leader enables his preferred study environment that also opens for those in attendance. For those who cannot attend, they get a remote connect link (thnk: WebEx or remote desktop with audio stream) to the class. Clicking on Scriptures in the notes opens to your preferred reader (think: bib.ly). Each person has their own digital notepad in which this saves into. Those who want it printed send it to their home/office printer or have a service like FedEx deliver it printed by the next morning. And then there is a mandatory “share this lesson” button where each attendee is asked to share the lesson with another and those metrics are shared with the entire community – the study leader able to see trends in how the lesson is shared over time (but not whom it was shared with). Lastly, all attendees have a dashboard where they can map their studies over time, reviewing topics, categories, and historical correlations to what they’ve been studying against commentaries, devotionals, and church history.

That’s just an example. And the kind of digital experience that lends to a bit more to native interactions that aren’t just digital by default, but hopeful towards transformation.

Having been in the mobile space a long time, seeing a lot of the conversation center around what happens simply on smartphones is kind of disheartening. Not just because smartphones still make up well less than a third of total mobile phones in use, but because I think we all end up not getting the kind of experience with a mobile that should be default.

Donald Stidwell also offers some thoughts on this. His is based more around the plans and other devices that he uses:

Well, on further reflection the question comes to me, why do I even need a smartphone at all? My iPad Mini is my most used gadget by a long shot. I also have an 5th generation iPod Touch as well as an iPod Classic (which stays in the car attached to the car stereo). I make almost no phone calls with my iPhone and seldom use it at all in the house since I have the iPad. And in point of fact, the only reason I don’t use the iPad more outside the house is because it’s a WiFi only model. The iPad Mini is small enough and light enough to carry just about anywhere and with an LTE model I could use it anywhere.

Read the rest of Why Do I Even Need A Smartphone Anymore at Donald Stidwell’s blog

Tablets with additional cellular abilities. Feature phones that do almost as much as smartphones (apps, service access) and do a bit more (battery, durability). Why not consider a non-smatphone and take those funds and do something more with your mobile expression?

Read something the other day: there are as many years between 1947 and 1980 as there are from 1980 to today.

33 years.

What did life look like in the USA in 1947? A few items come to mind:

• The idea of a TV in every home was not fully marketed yet
• Kids who were born during the Great Depression were in the middle of their teens and/or just entering adulthood
• There was no such thing as rock and roll music
• There were fewer than 10 English Bible translations used across churches
• There were no such thing as interstate highways
• You still called the switchboard operator to connect you to another by phone

By 1980, those points changed incredibly:

• The question wasn’t a TV in every home, but how many TVs were in your home
• If you were hitting your teens in 1980, that would make you a child of the end of the Civil Rights Era; if you were hitting adulthood, there’s a good chance your father was absent for fighting in Vietnam for some part of your childhood/teen years
• Rock and roll entered its down period (would come back by mid-decade), disco just about hit its end, and rap music wasn’t quite here yet
• Bible translations since 1980: ~5 NIV versions, ~7 RSV versions, ~14 KJV versions, ~8 dynamic translations, 2 internet-based versions, ~11 Messaniac versions, ~6 Catholic versions, 3 public domain versions… I think you get the picture (see Wikipedia article for complete breakdown)
• We’ve got a pretty expansive interstate highway system
• People don’t make phone calls like they used to

Consider what we have going for us today and what will happen in another 33 years. That’s a bit longer than a generation (20-25yrs). Does your work in mobile reflect that the world will change? Or, are you using mobile like an island, hoping that folks don’t go any further?

It would seem that many of us who fiddle with mobile have a bit of a culture problem. We latch onto the ideas of liberty and independence that mobile and the connected web offer, but then also tether ourselves to a tradition that’s not as free.

You disagree? I’d get that. We say things like, “how can we use mobile to evangelize to ‘x’ audience?” But, in saying that, we neglect one of the very key elements of mobile – its personal. Personal doesn’t mean we change the person’s mind when we want them to change, but that we open a door and let them come in when they are ready.

We do things like create mobile apps, but neglect those folks who already have mobiles, have already transformed aspects of their behavior by those mobiles, and will not own a mobile that is able to utilize such an application. Apps are logical entry points, but not everyone is going to do mobile in that way. Sometimes, more often than we want to admit, we have to think about the other ways folks can and would come into our content/event spaces – then design an accessible point that way. There’s a lot of hype towards apps, but, definitely ways we can think differently.

Parts of our faith tradition require that we do some things – celebrate the Lord in a shared meal, administer grace and provisions to those impoverished physically, socially, and spiritually, and extend the life of the faith through education and activity. The parts that don’t matter as much, which usually are the parts we hang onto the most, are the ones in which we try too hard to fit mobile into a shell that it doesn’t belong. In this wise, mobile has to equal liberty to develop new expressions of the faith, independence to discover these in the safety of the faith, and then develop new or refined traditions that speak towards a pursuit of that eternal fellowship, that eternal reward which makes this faith something worth living.

While the message that comes from MMM and others is that you should consider that someone might come to your website or web properties via a mobile device, we don’t always highlight the challenges that could result from doing so. Consider this a bit of a move to reconcile that.

Brad Frost is a very famous UI/UX designer, and has done considerable work making it possible for many in the mobile/mobile web/mobile app space to make sense of what’s going on. He’s recently put up a post titled Mobile Web Problems and How to Avoid Them that should sit as your go-to-guide for mobile web and mobile app development. Here’s a snippet:

the problem
Being denied access to an experience is easily the biggest problem mobile web users face. They come to websites on their mobile devices looking for information, looking to solve problems, looking to complete tasks, looking for answers. And they don’t get it. That’s a huge issue.

Read the rest of Mobile Web Problems and How to Avoid Them at Brad Frost’s website

There are a ton of these which aren’t just familiar to church and ministry sites, but even copied as if they are best practices. What are some of the mobile web problems you’ve seen?

Yesterday, while doing some customary reflection on things here and beyond, I asked myself a question about mobile and mobile ministry that I think is good for many of us to consider. I don’t haven an answer for it, but it does lend towards some considerable reflection towards what is happening here and whether its the right perspective to continue in:

White it seems to be true that each media shift has had some kind of economic impact, there are only a few that have gone the route of seemingly directly seeding new moments in humanity.

 

The rise of accessible printing facilities opened the door for literacy and education in a fashion that had never happened before. Radio’s invention and monetization created the entertainment and advertising industries. TV was a direct precursor to what many economists consider a middle class-driven economy.

 

But when we look at the Internet and mobile, we don’t (yet?) see the same thing happening. If anything, we see a shuffling of the chairs from those previous media elements.

 

If mobile is going to be considered a suitable endeavor, what about it will permanently reshape humanity? And if it doesn’t, are we wasting time calling it a profitable posture for ministry activity?

My weekends usually consist of these kinds of (internal) questions. But, this one stuck around and I felt it enough to share. Do respond in the comments or on Twitter with your thoughts, I’m interested in hearing what you think of all of this.