2021 Maryland Men of Faith Conference: No Fear

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Maryland Men of Faith

Brent Hardinge

Embracing Digital Evangelism: Social Media and Web Changing the Church

This media has been presented to you by the Maryland Men of Faith, where men are challenged and encouraged to form the character of Christ.

For more information, please visit www.mmof.org.

We're going to be talking this afternoon about digital evangelism and social media.

And so when you have questions, do you go to a friend?

Or do you search online for something else?

And even this, Google has become a verb to some extent.

And most companies don't like it to become a verb because it's hard to protect their copyright for their name.

But each day, millions and millions of people go online to look for answers to their questions.

Some questions that they look for answers for are as simple as how do you change the oil?

I have a couple here from a list of the top questions out of Google from 2020, I think.

I know for myself, every time I change the oil in my truck, I have to pull up a YouTube video that I have bookmarked that tells me how to reset the little light on there.

I read the book, it doesn't make any sense.

I look at the video, it reminds me, I can get it done.

How to stop climate change and the mask emoji or the hug emoji.

Both of those were in the top last year for some reason.

I think there are actually quite a few different ones.

But I think you can also sing Jesus Loves Me to go with it.

We have seen an incredible growth in technology over the last few years.

This is going back to the 1400s with the printing press and 1950s here with the man on the moon and it has just continued to accelerate at a faster and faster pace.

So much is happening when it comes to technology that it is mind-boggling to really keep up with it.

We've gone from the 1950s with this little beast here that was 1 of the early hard drives.

This held a grand total of 5 megabytes of space.

So most of our smartphones, a single image, a high quality image out of a smartphone would not even fit on this device.

And today, most of us have something like this in our pockets.

The other day, my daughter lost hers when we were getting on the plane.

It was in a different pocket in her backpack.

But they've gotten so small that we don't know where they are.

It's always strange to go into a place where there's no internet connection like right here.

It's also very nice to not have a cell phone connection.

That's Mount Everest there in the background.

We had stayed the night up under the clouds and a little closer where I could see the mountain right out my window all night.

At 16, 000 feet it's rather hard to sleep at that altitude when you just come in from much lower.

So I was up quite often and got to see it a lot, which was the perk.

But on that entire trip, for 7 days driving through Tibet, With the exception of being in a tunnel, I had a 5G cell phone connection the whole time, in the middle of nowhere.

And this actually was, as we watched the sunset, I FaceTimed my dad, who was not able to be on the trip with me and got to show him sunrise on Everest.

It's about 12 hours roughly more or less from here to there.

These little devices that we have everywhere, we can pick up the phone and we can look up information.

In fact, I rarely use my phone as a phone.

Most of the time it's some kind of texting or searching or some kind of other thing.

We also have these little ubiquitous devices, the smart speakers.

This has actually been a complete revolution in the way that search happens Because no longer are search engines actually looking for specific keywords, but they're looking more for the intent of what you're looking for, not that you've typed the keyword combination correct.

So we get better search results as a result.

But it also changes the way that the web really works because you're looking for a vocal answer because it will read you back an answer rather than just being able to read through or skim through a screen and see that.

And with the advent of the smartphone, 2007 is when the iPhone came out, Technology in phones have continued to advance.

They're putting more and more sensors into these things and they're even putting sensors in before they know what they're going to do with them.

Many of the iPhone versions, they just kind of, and actually even with more recent, they have, I think it's LIDAR, that is in some of the newer iPhones.

Androids also have some other sensors like that where they don't have a good solid answer.

There's no good use case of here's the best thing that you can do with this.

They might have some trite little thing that you can do and play around with, but as technology advances, as the software advances, they add more and more and more functionality into those.

In fact, my watch here can not only tell me the time, which is helpful, but it counts my steps, it checks my heart rate, it reads, I can read my text messages off of this, and so this technology is becoming more and more prevalent.

Hardware is obviously important, but even more so as part of this revolution is the software Because they can take these sensors and they can take these devices and continue to write more and more things into them.

And with the software we get social media, which is what we're here to look at.

In the early days, advanced software was spreadsheets and word processors, which if I was doing spreadsheets by hand, I would be much more excited about using Excel than I am today.

But now we go to these globally connected technologies where we have Google Docs and we have Facebook and we have all of these other incredible things.

Each of these little points on here is a device or a server or potentially even a more connected, and you see some of these things that have thousands and thousands of points coming into them, or little lines.

So that's a connection between 1 and another device.

I kind of tend to think that we're looking at a very zoomed out view, and if you keep going in, there's going to be more and more points.

But regardless of that, there are millions and millions of devices online.

Actually, billions would probably be the correct term to use, because as we get into the social media side of things, we'll start to see how that is even more true.

Technology, if we want to use that term loosely, has started as a broadcast medium.

So, from the printing press, it was 1 person could write something out.

I mean, I guess we could go further back and say just writing on papyrus.

But 1 person writes something out, it gets printed, and it gets distributed to a lot of people.

Those are terms that we equate to radio and television very easily.

It's a great way of getting a message out to a lot of people that are going to hear that.

But with the advent of social media and the web, really, we've turned more from a broadcast to what can be called a narrowcast or a conversational approach.

So I can write something or I can produce something that is very narrowly focused at somebody and they can respond to me and we can have even more of a real-time conversation.

And it's really important, I think, when it comes to evangelism and to what we as a church do online to keep that in mind because so often we think, okay, we'll build a website, we'll record a series of videos, and we'll put it up online, and it's done, right?

But we don't take the time to actually have that conversation, to define and refine what we're doing and our approach to people into a one-on-one or one-to-a-few type of level.

When you look at the advertising platforms that we have now, And those are things like Google, YouTube, which is 1 and the same, and Facebook.

You can, and there are other platforms as well, but you can very specifically, very narrowly target an ad to just a few hundred people globally, that is exactly what they need to hear because it's targeted based on their interests and their expressed interest and what the platforms know they are interested in.

Let's take a little bit of a look here at the social media landscape.

I assume that everyone here uses social media, so you might have heard of this 1.

Embracing Digital Evangelism: Social Media and Web Changing the Church

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