No More Scraps for Online Ministry. Full Assimilation.
This quote is one of my favorites. Watch it twice. Digest it for a moment instead of scrolling down. It's only 1 minute 17 seconds long.
“I remember reading an article when I was twelve years old I think it might have been in Scientific American. Where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth, how many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B. The Condor won, came in at the top of the list surpassed everything else and humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor all the way off the top of the list and it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. So for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool. Very early stages and we’ve come only a very short distance and it’s still in it’s formation but already we’ve seen enormous changes. I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next hundred years. ”
It got featured in the closing minutes of the Steve Jobs film (the good one) too.
Humans build tools to amplify ourselves. The internet is one of these tools. For a long time, online ministries argued for why church online was needed. We begged for scraps to prove it’s effectiveness. Flash forward ten years later, and most online ministries are organizational siloed. Private sandboxes are incredible for testing ideas. Many inside the box enjoy the freedom, but all things to need to mature. Beta can’t last forever (even Google knows that). Online ministry is a tool to amplify the entire church and not just the online church subdomain.
Online pastors need to integrate into the overall church’s strategy fully. I envision a future where I’m called a Pastor and not an Online Pastor. In my future, I use the internet to amplify my ministry no matter my position on the org chart. I can’t wait for this to be true. Some much more to come!