Blog

Tim Schraeder, the Dir. of Communications at Park Community Church and overall nice guy, just wrapped up a live webinar about how texting has made an impact at his church.  Here are a few notes.

Opening thoughts

• Email wasn’t working anymore.  People at the church were sending too many emails.  Some people were getting 30 emails a week.  Lots of emails going unopened and unread.   Park is a text savvy congregation, so they decided to try to use that technology.

5 Ways Texting Is Impacting Park Community Church:

1. Helped communicate bite sized nuggets of news in an instant way.

• Use it as a way to send out church wide messages, high level stuff.  Not smaller ministries.  High priority information.
• 1,300 people signed up for texting (1,500 average attenders at the time).

2. Live questions texted in during the service.

• Little awkward at first, but now it's more of a regular part of the services.
• Questions received are typically about the sermon, but some are about what’s going on in the world.
• Lowers the barrier between congregation and the pulpit platform.
• Gives the church leaders a feel for what’s on the minds of people.
• Park uses Jarbyco to manage the texts.
• They answer questions at the end of the service after letting people leave if they want.

3) Use texting to create shared moments.

• People come to the church and feel alone.  They feel like they’re dealing with issues no one else is.
• For example, Park used a texting poll about fears of the declining economy a couple of years ago as a launch into the sermon for that day.  Turned out lots of people were concerned.  Gives a chance for people to realize they’re not alone.

4) Use texting to expand the message series

• Park set up text groups related to the message series. 
• People can subscribe at the beginning of the series to get information and questions that relate to the messages throughout the series.
• It’s a way to keep connected to the content during the week.

5) Texting is enabling Park to talk with people

• Church can be one way communication sometimes.  This lets you listen to people not just talk at them.

Other thoughts:

• Start simple.  EZtexting.com lets you do mass texting for about 3-5 cents per text sent out. 
• Process for starting.  Get permission to text (opt-in).  Companies can set you up with a keyword people can text in to a number.  Example: text “CHURCHNAME” to 55555.  Also make it easy for people to know how to opt-out if they don’t want to get texts anymore.
• A negative is the technology gap where people don’t text.  A few people feel left out, but Park keeps texting because that’s what the majority of people use.  Texting isn't the only form of communication they use.
• You can spend a lot of time talking about doing texting, but the only way to fail is to not try.  You can’t be afraid of new technology.  We need to go where the people are and where the conversation is at.
• Be prepared for pastoral issues.  Park has received text messages about suicide and other things.  They have the phone numbers of people who text in and have a deacon follow-up on those sort of issues. 

Thanks to M2LIVE for the free webinar.  The archive of this (and other) sessions are availible here. 

If you're interested in trying texting during a service, Jarbyco is giving away free trial weekends. Text M2 to 62953