Tony Steward

If there is one thing that Digital Missions is amazing at it is reaching more people, faster then ever before with the good news about Jesus. Nothing can match the speed of digital mediums to communicate this message whether through the organized efforts of a local church or the impassioned voice of one of Jesus’ followers. But just because the potential is greater for reach then in any other generation ever to live - doesn’t mean it is so easily realized.

There is a lot of noise in digital environments. It is one of the first places where the insecure pursuit of being “same” and not standing out too much is punished most severely. It is the truly remarkable that standout, find attention, and are then blessed and burdened with the responsibility of it. Just throwing the same thing, typically done, online isn’t going to be as effective as studying digital environments, knowing the people you are trying to reach, and then taking the risks necessary to reach them.

For us in the online ministry of LifeChurch.tv this has taken several forms, some failures, some wins that we are still trying to keep up with the the momentum on, and some that are still experimental as we learn what connects with people.

The first, and more controversial, is what we call “missional advertising.” This is our effort to leverage the Google Adwords environment, the ads you can place in the midst of Google Searches. The most popular (by this I mean the one that gets the most clicks) are our advertisements to individuals searching for pornography. 3-5% of all searches happening at anytime online are gear around porn. Being able to connect with people searching for something to fill their lives - and to give them another option, has proven extremely powerful. And this isn’t a bait and switch, or trickery. Our advertisements are clear that we think there is a better option then their current search, one that has true life and fulfillment at it’s end. Nothing we’ve done or found has the reach potential of missional advertising. This year missional advertising alone has accounted for over 2.5 million unique visits to our Church Online experiences at http://live.lifechurch.tv.

Another reach effort that is ongoing, but hasn’t been what we expected, is our work with the LifeChurch.tv Facebook Page. Seeing the rapid growth of other Christian centric pages we thought for a while that maybe our work in Facebook could generate viral attention that could rival Missional Advertising. We were wrong. And while we have over 50,000 fans on our ministry page that creates conversation, shares scripture, and connects people in our community every day - it doesn’t generate nearly as many unique visits to the environment where we preach the gospel overtly.

What it does have in advantage over missional advertising is the relational value of the medium with the time on site from people coming to Church Online experiences being 4-6 times as long as from Google Ads. We have found that the Facebook environment carries the fantastic weight of relationship in our organized effort. So it has become more of a Response medium, with residual reach benefits, in our online ministry. (We have found that empowering our community to share in social media is far more powerful then our efforts there in regards to Reach.)

The last more obvious Reach strategy we’ve taken was stirred by the creative challenge of the question: What would a modern day digitally empowered evangelistic Billy Graham stadium crusade look like? What does the large evangelistic event become with the existence of the internet, online events, streaming media, and social ties? We are quite far from figuring this one out, but the first idea centered on the thought of “What if the new stadiums aren’t location based but need or affinity based?”

With that in mind, and the LifeChurch.tv passionate value of “we will do anything short of sin to spread the gospel” we created http://thepornevent.com (with the assistance of XXXchurch.com). The point of this event and website was to be a high relevancy connection to the gospel for the masses of people searching for pornography and connecting with our online ministry. On it’s launch it connected with 5,500 people and saw over a 250 come into a new relationship with Jesus in seven days, which is successful by many standards. But not the larger scale, stadium type results we were wanting to go after. We aren’t done with this line of thinking, just need to lean into it further as well as garner partnerships with other ministries, to full realize it’s potential.

Reach: it is the start of the strategy for any online ministry. Done passively by just broadcasting something into digital spaces it will probably just fall into the stream of noise easily ignored. But done intentionally, honoring the voice and call that God has given you as an individual or as a local expression of His Church, and the impact can be tremendous.