Digital Evangelism Issues

A UK team has just launched a new online resource with video shorts, aimed at mid-to-late teens.

It answers questions about faith in an outsider-friendly and accessible way, so it is ideal for youthgroup members to use and share.

Founder Darren Quinnel writes:

Message to the Masses is more than just a website and resource – we exists to ignite a faith-sharing passion in young people’s hearts.

Our aim is not only to see young people understand their faith but also to help and support them in defending that faith. We do this through online multimedia and social networks, with users being able to create their own account profile, share their own personal story of Jesus and help their friends to start their own journey to discover God.

Starting a journey with Jesus doesn’t mean you know all the answers, but through Message to the Masses young people can discover answers for themselves and create firm foundations to help them understand, defend and share their faith!

Visit MessagetotheMasses.com and you can follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

It’s out! The incredible Tom Hooper 2012 movie is now released on DVD: USA | UK. This is a renewed opportunity to use this incredibly redemptive story as a discussion starter in many different situations.

Resources to help you:

• Damaris Leader’s Guide, Extra Questions booklet, and video clips all available as free downloads. Incidentally, Damaris have just launched Film Clubs to help community groups, workplaces, neighborhoods, churches or coffee shops run a film discussion groups.
• Free article Mercy Triumphs by Rusty Wright, 640 words, free to reproduce online or in print.
• Discussion of the story’s themes, with links to free study guides, articles, the libretto, book recommendations, and more.
• A just-published article in Christianity magazine by Martin Saunders, A Life Less Misérables, explains how the story can be powerfully harnessed to start conversations about God.
• Adrian Fricker has produced a free two-up printable handout in PDF format. You may also freely reproduce or modify the text for your own needs under a Creative Commons License.

Have you used this story in any way? Please share on our comments section below.

Ministry in the Digital Age
Strategies for Best Practices for a Post-Website World
David T Bourgeois
IVP Books
ISBN 978-0-8308-5661-9

Happily there are at last a growing number of books about various aspects of digital ministry. Dave Bourgeois’ new book is primarily written to help Christian ministries understand how to integrate the Internet into their existing work.

What are the best evidence-based practices to implement? How do you best truly integrate digital, rather than just bolting on a few social networking options to an unchanged structure?

For these things are no longer optional luxuries. Any ministry or non-profit without an effective digital and social media policy, owned and understood by the whole team, is doomed to near invisibility and likely failure.

Dr Bourgeois takes you through both the strategic planning and the practical steps for implementation. On his book page, he explains the background to the book, with an online preview of the introduction and appendices. Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ feature also previews part of the first chapter, or click Google Preview button to see extra taster pages ▶

Where to find it

The book is widely available, including from Amazon US, Amazon UK and their other stores, Koorong Australia, Manna NZ, Flipkart India and many more.

It’s also available in Kindle, and, slightly cheaper, in epub, mobi and PDF formats direct from IVPress. You don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle ebooks – just download the free software/app to your PC/Mac, tablet or smartphone.

Win a copy

Do any of these things before the end of May, then email me to say where I can find it along with your postal address, and the winner, chosen at random, will receive get the book:

• Tweet about this page using this ready-made link, or include the #ieway hashtag
• Share this review on a Facebook group or personal page
• Link to or republish this review (an edited summary is fine) in a blog
• Syndicate our blog posts to your Facebook personal or group page using Networked Blogs
• Embed our daily Paper.li news roundup into the margin of any webpage or blog – just copy the code from the ‘Share > embed this newspaper’ link at top-right of Digital Evangelism Resources.

Share your thoughts

When you’ve read the book, please add feedback about it on our comment section below.

More books

Michael Hyatt’s excellent Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World is currently very cheap as a Kindle ebook ($4.82/£3.14). Check our other reviews of digital communication books and our page of free ebook downloads.

Pop Goes the Church: Should the Church Engage Pop Culture?
Tim Stevens
Power Publishing
ISBN 0979017491

Tim Stevens makes an inspiring case for leveraging pop culture to reach out to people in the language of their lives, with compelling biblical backing for this approach. He offers a new perspective that give relevance and impact to the church by using popular culture – stories from movies and music – to point people to the gospel. He encourages us to get out of our comfort zones and look people in the eyes, meeting them wherever they are.

Although he writes in the context of using pop culture as an evangelistic starting point within local church ministry, his insights equally apply to using it for online evangelism, which is a huge and barely used opportunity. There are embedded ‘echoes of eternity’ in many movies, music lyrics, and other stories. An outreach site using Bollywood films as a starting point could be hugely strategic in India, for example.

Incidentally, you do not have to agree with the application of this approach in every example he cites of how different churches are using the pop-culture as a starting point. What one church may feel to be appropriate within its particular culture and demographic may not necessarily resonate with you. Each must use this approach as they are led.

The book is still widely available from Amazon and other outlets, with plenty of very cheap used copies too. In US, the new price is $4, with plenty secondhand at $0.01. Read a number of taster pages using Google Preview button ▶

If you've read it, please add your thoughts in our comment section.

Helpful advice from Socially Stacked – a good source of tips for social media communication. And a second infographic below from WhitefireSEO on how social media boosts your web site’s search engine positioning.

Social Media and SEO – An infographic by the team at WhiteFire, an SEO Company

Check our other recent posts on social networking opportunities and resources.

If you are a church that has not yet started with social media, here are three reasons to begin. And Internet Toolbox for Churches is wonderful resource for churches to learn how to use digital media to connect with outsiders.

Choose your comfiest chair, make yourself a tasty coffee (or other beverage as preferred) and settle down for a 45-minute journey with Professor Brian Sturm to learn more about story.

Sturm presents storytelling as a way of organizing information, conveying emotions, and building community. A model of storytelling as altered state of consciousness (the story trance) is presented that includes 16 portals to altered states. Three stories are told to illustrate the theoretical model: Truth and Story; What Happens When You Really Listen; and The Stone Cutter. Storytelling ethics and the need for trust and truth are discussed.

Storytelling is the essential ingredient for almost all effective communication, be it evangelism, discipleship, or advocacy for a non-profit or cause.

Please check our other recent posts on storytelling.

Photo credit: By Ldorfman (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The latest Damaris movie resources are available from today – for the film Quartet.

The Damaris team writes:

A few months ago we were pleased to provide free official resources for the cinema release of the film Quartet – starring Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay and Pauline Collins. Now, in readiness for its release on DVD, Blu-ray and Download (available from 6th May 2013) we have created some more – together with three new downloadable video features. They are all available from the 6th May, completely free, at www.damaris.org/quartet.

Please help us by spreading the word about these new resources to your members in the church, who you think will find them useful for home-groups, services and outreach events.

Hans Christian Andersen said, “Where words fail, music speaks.” That’s certainly the experience of many. And the official resources we have created to accompany Quartet will help people to listen to what music might tell us about love, loss, life, hope, fun and fulfilment – all illustrated by the characters in this delightful and inspirational film.

Quartet is directed by Dustin Hoffman who said: “Someone once commented that ‘old age ain’t no fun’ but I’ve always believed that your soul can expand.” We hope that our resources and this film will help many to experience that for themselves.”

Quartet trailer

There’s much more on Damaris

Check out the many other culture-watching features on their site – for instance:

• the new discussion guide on the Oblivion movie.
  

• Articles/discussion guides on Iron Man 3 and Promised Land.
  

• If you live in UK and are going to the Christian Resources Exhibition, Esher, you can catch the Damaris team there on the Friday 17 May for seminars and workshops.

You can also download the free ebook Using Film in Christian Communication by Damaris staffer Tony Watkins from our free ebook page.

Movies and popular culture are a God-given starting point for discussion.

Check our other recent posts about movies.

Bryan Allain’s excellent book about effective social networking, Community Wins: 21 Thoughts on Building a Thriving Online Tribe is no longer available free. For more on the book, read our original review. Bryan blogs here.

Download the book from Amazon US | Amazon UK or your nearest Amazon store. Tell your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

No need for a Kindle

You don’t need to have a Kindle to read Kindle books – you can easily download Amazon’s free Kindle software for your PC or Mac (though they do not make the download links particularly easy to find) or smartphone:

• USA: PC | Mac
• UK: PC | MAC
• or their free apps for iPad and all smartphones – search your app store

Then all you need is an Amazon account, and your computer or smartphone becomes a Kindle reader.

More resources

• More free ebooks on communication, strategy, evangelism
• More recent posts on social networking
• Coming shortly: review of Dave Bourgeous’ new book Ministry in the Digital Age: Strategies and Best Practices for a Post-Website World.
• C S Lewis enthusiasts will welcome Alister McGrath’s new Lewis biography
  biography published today.
• Publishing later May 2013: Sheridan’s Voysey’s Resurrection Year. Prepublication reviews are all incredibly positive.
• And in July, Meredith Gould’s The Social Media Gospel releases: book cover. Meredith is the person behind the #chsocm Church and Social Media discussions on Twitter.

The TruthMedia digital evangelism team urgently needs volunteers, working in their sparetime at home. Please republish this page, or share the opportunity widely on social media.

Karen Schenk, National Director Media Strategies, writes:

We have a huge opportunity for people to help share God’s love! Jesus Daily, a Facebook page with over 16 million users, is now partnering with TruthMedia. We are doing follow-up for the thousands of private messages that are sent in to that page. These messages come into The Mentor Center and our mentors can answer them.

Just this week one of our mentors shared that he received a message that simply read ‘thank you’. He wrote the person and engaged in conversation with them. Within a short time the mentor led this person to the Lord. When someone becomes a mentor for TheMentorCenter, we train them each step of the way, including how to transition to share Christ or help a person take next steps in their spiritual journey.

As of a few minutes ago, there are OVER 15,000 messages waiting to be responded to. We are desperate for more mentors. If you or someone you know would like to make a huge difference in people’s lives through this ministry, please go http://www.thementorcenter.com/jesus-daily/ and fill out the application.

1000 volunteers needed!

To answer all of these messages, we actually need over 1,000 more mentors. Please help us get the word out!

Here are two of the messages waiting for responses:

• “Jesus! Please I need help, I always promise God that i would repent, but then I just turn into the old me, I swear and do a lot of bad stuff, I need help!

• “I am muslim and i want to ask you about your religious and may i follow your own thought ok?”

This is an evangelist outreach and the harvest is great. There are thousands of seekers coming through this page wanting to know Jesus. There are also believers asking all kinds of questions about life and faith.

It’s an unprecedented opportunity to have a huge reach around the entire globe. Please pray for us as we journey through this transition and work on simplifying and scaling our processes so that we truly can reach millions. God has opened up an amazing opportunity for us! We want to share it with you.”

Mentoring can be a hugely fulfilling ministry, needs no technical knowledge, and TruthMedia provides full training and support. This short video explains more, and can also be embedded in your own site or blog.

Many people still seem to feel that storytelling and humor are, if even used at all, minor elements to bolt onto the beginning or end of the ‘real’ message we are trying to communicate.

In reality, these should be integral to all communication, embedded and inseparable. This applies equally whether it is evangelism, teaching, or advocating a nonprofit or ministry.

Here’s a useful short explanation by Dennis Brook: Three Powerful Storytelling Methods to Improve Your Writing or Speaking, first published in the Northwest Christian Author newsletter.

Strategic new book

Scott McClennan’s new book Tell Me a Story: Finding God (and Ourselves) Through Narrative is a valuable explanation of the significance of storytelling. Scott briefly describes his book here with a more detailed explanation from CMS. It’s widely available, eg from Amazon US, Amazon UK and other outlets. I’ll be reviewing the book shortly – but be assured, it is excellent.

Storytelling expert Wilton Blake has drawn together a reading list of good (secular) storytelling books.

Check our other recent features on storytelling and humor.

Free ebooks on humor

We often do not realize how much humor is embedded in the Bible, and specifically Jesus’ ministry. Read more, and download free ebooks about humor and the Bible. See our other free ebooks too.

New phone app

10,000 audio messages in 6000 languages from Global Recordings Network and other sources are now available within the new Android phone app 5fish.

Mobile Advance blog explains why audio files can be better than video for some cultures and situations.