Category Archives: Ministry

Engaging the Facebook Generation

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Engaging the Facebook Generation

Digital Mission is a UK-based organization aiming to bridge faith and the current technological context we live in.

They have just posted a series of prezi presentations (Like powerpoint, but way cooler!) on Engaging the Facebook Generation

The first presentation is here, and the second one is here, and there is one more on the way.

I found through watching them that it reminded me that we are living in exciting times right now. The internet and social media is changing the landscape of our world. It truly is a revolution. I was also inspired at the different opportunities that exist to us as God’s ambassadors to use these resources in ways that the secular world already is, and even to go beyond that and employ our God-given creativity to use the internet in ways that the world has not yet thought of.

What captures your attention as you watch these presentations? what ideas does it give you for how the church can use the internet and social media to further God’s kingdom?

Watch … Think … Chat

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It is imperative as we go out to fulfill the Great Commission that we go to where people are. And if we are going to reach the emerging generation, then that means that we must go on the internet, particularly onto social networks to engage them in conversation aout the gospel.

Finding ways in which we can do this successfully is one of the main goals of my work in developing creative evangelism strategies for our campuses.

In July we took three students from Hong Kong to New Zealand for V20, a conference of 600 students from all over the Asia-Pacific region. Usually at conferences like these in New Zealand we would have a day of outreach in the local community. However, with 600 students, this would have been overwhelming for the small local community where we were situated. Therefore we explored the possibility of running an online component to our outreach. We ended up with 200 students – a third of those at the conference participating in our online outreach. All of them were crowded into a small chapel with about 50 computers, creating a buzz like the floor of a stock exchange or a telethon, as people yelled out that they got a response to a message they had posted to their friends, or saw the screen up the front as it showed the number of views we had tick over 1000, or 5000.

We set up a website (www.watchthinkchat.com) which included the latest anime short film produced by the Jesus film (My Last Day) followed by a short gospel presentation and an opportunity for visitors to then have a live chat with one of our students.

My Last Day KGP

Each of the students involved in the outreach posted a link to the website, and we also did some promotion through some Facebook fan pages. Over the course of the afternoon we had 10,000 people watch the short film, including visitors from Saudi Arabia and Iran. 2000 of those who viewed the film were friends of our students, from which we were abe to have 200 live chats about the gospel leading to two people indicating decisions to trust Christ.

The best thing about this outreach though, was that the vast majority of spiritual conversations that were initiated were with people that the students already knew, and would be in contact with again after the conference. I believe that the gospel spreads most quickly and effectively along relational networks, and an outreach like this, although at first it may seem less personal, actually maximizes the use of our students’ personal networks, as well as helping them to initiate those often hard-to-start spiritual conversations with their friends.

On the Facebook group for the conference there have been posts by students about follow-up conversations they have been able to have like this one: “I’ll meet up with a girl who became a Christian through the internet outreach at v20 tomorrow lunch time!!”

Another win was seeing many students eyes opened as to how they can use the internet to share their faith: “Just used Yahoo Answers for evangelism. If anyone has some spare time and wants people to talk about about God, there are hundreds of people asking questions about God on it all the time.”

On a more technical note, it was encouraging to see that we had a high click-through rate for the link we posted with approximately one of of every six people who saw the link clicking through to watch the video. This is a very high rate for Facebook (or anything on the internet actually!)

Our challenge now is to take the lessons that we have learned from this experience to refine our strategy to be more effective, and also to recreate this experience on our campuses around the world. Please pray for this as we are in the process of developing GodChat, a tool to help us run online outreaches like these more effectively, taking advantage of the unique opportunities that social networks give us. We hope to have this up and running and available for people to use around the world by the end of the year.

Can the Gospel ‘Go Viral’?

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A good friend of mine develops applications for Facebook. He tells me that there is a simple formula for calculating whether a given app will go viral, called the viral coefficient. It is a function of three factors:

  • Publish rate: the number of times a user will publish their use of an app in a given time
  • Click-through rate: the proportion of people who see the published uses of the app who will click-through to visit the app
  • Install rate: the proportion of users who will go on to install the app (and then consequently publish their usage to their friends)

You multiply these three numbers together and if the result is greater than 1 then the application will go viral. An interesting point is that it does not need to exceed 1 by very much (he had a huge success with one app with a viral coefficient of 1.04)

My thoughts turned to how this related to the spread of the gospel. If we regard Christianity as a movement then it must have a lot in common with viral trends. However, whereas viral trends on the internet work in terms of days and weeks, Christianity’s growth can be measured in centuries (or perhaps better by generations). If we take these terms and apply them to the gospel, then we could suggest that

  • Publish rate = the number of people whom a Christian shares the gospel with over a certain time period.
  • Click-through rate =  the proportion of people who hear the gospel who respond in faith
  • Install rate = the proportion of these new Christians who go on to become active in sharing their faith

Interestingly, these three rates correspond very closely to three terms that are closely linked to our ministry’s strategy – Win, Build, and Send.

  • Win corresponds closely with the Click-through rate. If we are doing a good job of winning people to the faith, then we should expect that a good proportion of those who hear the gospel to respond in faith.
  • Build would correspond to the Install rate. Our ability to build disciples for the Great Commission would be accurately measured by how many of those we begin to disciple go on to be active in sharing their faith.
  • Send would correspond to the Publish rate. We aim to send those we have won and built back out to Win, Build and Send more. The amount of gospel preaching done by our disciples would be a good measure of how well we are sending.

Multiplying these three numbers together would give us a good indicator of whether a particular campus is a movement – something that has taken on a life of its own, or whether it is a ministry, where the group grows only as a result of input from outside.

Using the numbers from our campuses in Hong Kong, I did some quick calculations, and our viral coefficients range from 0.53 to 0.06 on our different campuses.

So, what would things look like in your ministry? And where do you think we most need to improve?

My Last Day

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Hi all,

Over the past few weeks I have been working on an internet outreach using a new anime version of the Jesus film.

My Last Day

The new film is a 9-minute story, which utilizes dialogue from the original “JESUS” film. It unfolds through the eyes of a criminal who receives the same brutal crucifixion sentence as Christ. The criminal’s own guilt causes him to realize Christ’s innocence. “My Last Day” is a short film of regret, repentance and redemption that frames the story of salvation using Japanese-style animation to capture the attention of a new generation.

At the moment, the finishing touches are currently being put on the film, but I can show you a few stills to get an idea of what it will look like:

My Last Day screenshot 1My Last Day screenshot 2

My Last Day screenshot 3My last Day screenshot 4

The idea behind this production was that while the Jesus film had experienced a  lot of success in places where there was not a lot of exposure to film and video, in areas where film and video were widely available, the effectiveness of the film in bringing people to Christ was significantly diminished. The main demographic that the film found difficult to break into was urban, young people – which is exactly the sort of people that we are focused on reaching through our ministry on university campuses. What they discovered they needed was a visual translation.

And so they began work on a series of short vignettes, each showing the person of Christ through the eyes of a particular person, and presenting them in a style that would connect with young urban people – anime! (You can read about what I think of manga – the print cousin to anime here.) This film is from the point of view of the thief on the cross.

All of the animation was done at a Japanese animation studio, so it is authentic Japanese anime. And because it uses dialogue directly from the Jesus film, they use the hundreds of different languages that the Jesus film has already been translated into. Because the translation work has already been done, the process of adding a new language track can be incredibly quick.

This film will be launched to the public over Easter 2011. I am currently helping co-ordinate a global internet campaign using this film for Easter.

Persuasion

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We’ve all reached that point in sharing the gospel, when we’ve shot all of our bullets. All of the arguments and evidence that we’ve learnt and stored up to convince someone of the truth of the gospel have failed to bring them around. What do we do? Seth Godin recently blogged about how for many people in many situations, there is nothing that you can tell them that would change their mind.

He suggests that the solution is not more evidence. He gives the example of someone who thought the polio vaccine was bad. When he tried to convince the person with evidence, he met the reply of “that’s all faked, promoted by the pharma business.” Someone with an assumption of suspicion towards an idea or group, will always be able to interpret the evidence in such a way that confirms their assumptions.

So what do we do? We tell stories. Not just any old stories. They have to be stories from people who the persons trusts implicitly. And they have to be conversion stories. Telling how they came to move away from these unshakeable assumptions.

“What would change his mind, what would change the mind of many people resistant to evidence is a series of eager testimonials from other tribe members who have changed their minds. When people who are respected in a social or professional circle clearly and loudly proclaim that they’ve changed their minds, a ripple effect starts. First, peer pressure tries to repress these flip-flopping outliers. But if they persist in their new mindset, over time others may come along. Soon, the majority flips. It’s not easy or fast, but it happens.”

And this is what we are called to do in sharing the gospel. As an insider, as a scientist, or artist, or entrepreneur, or whatever we do, we are called to shake the anti-gospel assumptions that the world makes about how we should live and work in those arenas, by telling our story of how Jesus broke us out of those assumptions.

Communicating through video

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Further to my last post putting the case for communicating visually, Digital Evangelism Issues have a survey of some of the visual resources available for communicating the gospel (or starting gospel conversations.)

I posted last year about the fantastic Manga Bible series produced by Next Manga. (They have a Facebook group too.) They have also recently put together a gospel booklet based on the series called The Search. The Chinese version is available for sale at Hong Kong Campus Crusade for Christ.

And I also have a link on this blog to Global Short Film Network, whom we have partnered with for our short film production here in Hong Kong. They recently redesigned their website, and all 30+ of their videos are available for free in mobile format. (You need to pay if you want HD versions.)

One great resource that will soon be available is a short anime film looking at Jesus from the point of view of the thief on the cross, developed from the Jesus Film. Limited information is available here, but much more should be available very soon. (I’ll post any as soon as I have it.)

Storytelling Animals

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Christianity Today has a great article on how first-person storytelling is the new buzz in the club scene in New York, and its Christian roots.

The simple answer is because we are “storytelling animals,” to use Green’s term. “A hunger for stories is built into our DNA.” Or as Allison put it: “Oral storytelling is so hard wired into the way we make sense of it all and how we find the meaning in our lives.”

More encouragement for us to tell our stories of how Jesus has transformed our lives.

Head out to the Green

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CruPress is Campus Crusade for Christ’s publishing arm, and you can find a lot of new tools and resources there, like the Perspective cards that were released recently. It is often where I first learn about new resources that have been published.

CruPress Green

A couple of months ago, they introduced CruPress Green, where you can get a whole bucketload of resources for free! Cru.Comm Bible Studies? Check! The Compass one-on-one discipleship material? Check! And a whole bunch of talks, articles, etc as well.

Check it out. I found some really good insights in c456: the CoJourners training videos