If your church is trying to figure out what to do and where to go when it comes to social media and mobile apps, read on. We have the privilege to share some words of wisdom with you from David Brazzle with Immanuel Lutheran Church, Palatine, IL. Below he shares how his church stays relavent in a digital, mobile and social media saturated culture:
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Like many churches these days, we are doing our best to balance and weigh the cost-to-benefit ratio of what we do. Our mission is to spread good news of Jesus Christ into the community and world, while at the same time meeting the spiritual needs of our members and nurturing their faith. So, that leads to the question of how does one best do this with the resources that you have?
As the saying goes, God’s message is absolute and does not change, but the method of delivering His message must.
During the last year we have invested in upgrading our website and upgrading our ability to live-stream and record our services and special events. Our A/V team took up the challenge and honed their skills. Our church leadership believed in us and made some investments in microphones and such.
All of this was foundational in adapting our message to the realities of today’s culture. In particular, the young adults of today that all churches are seeking to reach use the internet and social media.
If you’re not keeping an eye on your church members’ median age, you looking for trouble. With that foundation in place, the obvious end-game was to deliver our already-existing media content, blogs, newsletters, event calendar, classroom information, late-breaking news via dedicated mobile apps on both the iOS and Android platforms. In fact, the app was always in the plan as our end-game.
The beauty of the ROAR app and the ROAR architecture is that the app automatically updates its content, all by itself. We knew that we had limited people and limited financial resources, that a brute force approach was not a viable, sustainable option. Instead, we found an elegant solution, that proved to work perfectly with the ROAR environment. It just works, without us having to do anything extra.
All of our leadership who have seen a preview of the app are so excited and highly complementary of how well it turned out.
- Our PK-8 grade school is already viewing it as a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
- Our Board of Elders and our Outreach And Assimilation ministries are also viewing it as a powerful new tool in reaching out into our community, our members, our surrounding community and to our non-member school families.
- Our A/V and web teams are excited because we are leveraging all that they are doing and making what they do even more valuable. ROAR and our app have exceeded our expectations in every way.
Compared to the alternative of hiring a consultant to program apps in both iOS and Android, the challenge of maintaining them both, the flexibility that ROAR offers in importing existing media assets, at the relative costs involved… combine to make the ROAR solution a literal no-brainer.
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