Mikel Berger’s Bailiwick

Dr. Albert Mohler has an interesting article about the culture shift that technology has caused.

Welcome to the world of the Digital Nomads. They can live and work almost anywhere, but tend to be concentrated in larger numbers in locales where the so-called creative class is also concentrated — in large metropolitan areas and in university towns.

Later in the same article he addresses how this shift affects the church (emphasis mine).

The Digital Natives and Digital Nomads also represent a significant missiological and evangelistic challenge for the Christian church. These groups are not easily impressed, nor are they as likely to be reached by some of the more traditional evangelistic approaches used by many churches. Newspaper ads mean nothing to a generation that never touches newsprint.

I had a conversation with someone at my church awhile ago about our church doing either billboard or online advertising. They said our church wouldn’t go for it. I asked if that was because our church didn’t believe in advertising at all (there’s a topic for another blog post). They said no, that probably isn’t the case because our church has paid for an ad in the local newspaper for years. I replied that the newspaper ad then tells me the church isn’t interested in reaching out to my generation. I’ve been in the Lafayette area for over a decade now and never once seen the ad. Now I know my church and I know they deeply care about telling my generation about Jesus Christ. So we just need to align our actions with our intentions a little better.

And Kossuth Street Baptist Church is doing that. They are investing some pretty significant money (especially for a church of our size) into a new website to improve communication among various groups (those already members of KSBC, believers looking for a church, those skeptical or with questions about Jesus, and to also be a resource to other churches are the 4 main groups we’ve identified). I’m praying the new site will be available soon. The importance of it is echoed near the end of Dr. Mohler’s article (again the emphasis is mine).

One major study published in recent years indicated that one of the main factors tied to numerical growth in churches was the strength of a church’s Internet presence. “Snail mail” addresses may be less important at first than a Web address, and increasing numbers of those in the digital generations assume that if an organization has an insignificant Web presence, it must be an insignificant organization.