Gerald Wolgemuth

Address delivered by Larry Hollon at UMAC in Providence, R.I

Larry Hollon – Feb 1, 2009

I find myself, I’m always in the position of having to explain Rethink Church quickly. I have 10 minutes with the Directors of Connectional Ministry to do Rethink Church and at the table we’ve all become experts of how do you explain Rethink Church in about 30 seconds while you’re giving people a t-shirt and a brochure and a button. And that’s great. We just want folks to know about it. There’s a great article in the current issue of the Interpreter that gives you more background on that and the brochure that we brought with us actually hasn’t even been to United Methodist Communications in Nashville. It came to us directly from the printer so this continues to be an exciting ministry for us, it’s evolving and we’re trying to get the word out as quickly as we can, but if you don’t get an opportunity to hear about how we move from Igniting Ministry to Rethink Church and the context of the culture, you really miss an important part of this. And so I’m thrilled that you’re here this morning because the general secretary of United Methodist Communications, Larry Hollon, has put together a presentation that, I think really gives you an understanding of why we think right now is a right time for Rethink Church and I’m happy that as he’s going to stand here and look out at you he’s going to see Rethink Church t-shirts on you, and that’s great because we really think the time is right and the more we present this to folks, the more we see heads nodding and the more these people say, “You know, you’re absolutely right. This is really where we need to be.” I hope you feel that way too when you’re done. Before I ask Larry to come up, I’m just going to take an opportunity, if we can just take a moment Sunday morning we want to give praise and thanks to God for the presence here during all this going on here, and also for our safe travels. Let’s just take a moment to pray and give thanks.

Prayer: Gracious and Almighty God and the beauty of this morning and this time that we have for sharing our excitement about the opportunity for your church to reach out in new ways. We just want to give you all the thanks and the praise for the blessings that have come our way. We pray Lord that you would open our hearts and our minds that we might open doors to church, new doors Lord that we may not have been aware of, places where people are going to encounter Jesus Christ, are going to encounter a community and a fellowship that cares about the world, that cares about your children, that cares about justice, and that is willing to be involved in making a difference in peoples lives. Lord, bless this time we share, and bless all those who have come here, bless those who are already traveling and grant your safe travel to them. And in all that we do Lord, may all our efforts and all of our work bring glory to you and draw others closer to you. May we be your instruments of love as we move in our communities, as we move around the world. We pray this and we lift it to you, in the name of your son our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

I’m happy to turn this over to our General Secretary Larry Hollond to share with you the context and how we think church came to be.

Thank you Ken. Good morning. It is a real pleasure to see this many bright and shiny faces at 8:30 …….. and some of you have put in here and the three days the others have put in here. As a …….. the Rethink Church presentation which Ken and I have worked on now for a few weeks, I want to share with you just a bit of, a really brief bit of theological reflection about  why the church needs to be engaged in media as we are and it may be helpful to you as you interpret to folks back in your local churches why that is.

The first thing that occurs to me, and this comes out of the conversation that we actually participated in a couple of days ago in Greater New Jersey, and that is that the media, particularly, in western cultures, in the form of radio and TV, primarily, and through the expression of advertising, has been a vehicle to divide us, to define us individually as consumers and it has had the corrosive effect of leading us away from the kind of unified understanding of ourselves in community and a more unbiblical understanding of ourselves as individuals in isolation from each other. The church then gets into dangerous territory, when it beg ins to engage in these media that have divided, alienated, and isolated us and attempts to re-use those media and become a force for, or a subtle persuasion for integrating us with unified messages and whole messages and redefines us individually, not as consumers, but with an invitation to become part of the faith community that says we are all children of God. The holy creation. And so as we begin to think about rethinking church, we also need to rethink how church engages media, and that engagement is a theological engagement. It is attempting to provide a message of good news, keeping the good news new, if you will, in media that have, for the most part been hostile to that message and that understanding of life. So there is a real theological basis for us doing this, and if we had more time and I had given more thought to it, I could relate to you how I think that this really does reflect what Jesus did when he confronted the woman at the well and spoke to her and she didn’t  understand the language that he was using as a religious leader, did not believe that she was worthy of receiving his understanding and her life as changed because of that confrontation and that was street theology, that was Jesus using the medium that was available at a time to communicate to someone who was seeking and sought him out later to hear more about why she was worthy to be accepted as a child of God. So that’s a little bit of a background.

What I’d like to do this morning is for us to look at a context for why the church needs to engage in these media in the way that we are proposing. How we have evolved from the emphasis on a seeker message through Igniting Ministry that targets a particular audience and does target individuals in that audience, to this next step that we are very excited about called Rethink Church. And in order to do that I want to share with you a bit of background information about the media context in which we live, but I think it will all come to together to make sense as being more than about media. So to do that I want to look at some headlines, and the first headline that we need to reflect on is the one that was weeks ago, and it was weeks before Russian tanks rolled into Georgia. Remember that? A cyber attack was mounted that shut down Georgian government websites. It illustrated how integral the internet has become to our lives. Security experts say it was a dress rehearsal for an all out cyber war. The first time a known cyber attack had coincided with an actual shooting war. The next headline is no longer for teens, social networking is a tool for high paid managers to find out about job opportunities. Social networking, Facebook began in 2004. Today it has 150 million active users. When we started doing this presentation, I presented these statistics about 4 months ago to our commission, at that time Facebook had 50 million active users. I got on the Mashable website a couple days and Mashable, they’re geeks who write the website copy, said they were stunned. And so they called Facebook and they said, “How do you know that it’s really 150 million active users and not 150 million people who signed up and are no longer using their website?” And they know because Facebook measures how many times you have an entry on your Facebook page and so they know if you’re being active or not active and they only count those who have. And in 4 months, 100 million people have added themselves to the Facebook social networking website.

Social networking is changing relationships in subtle, but significant ways, the sum of which we don’t yet completely understand. Text messaging is so widespread that state legislatures are debating laws to prohibit texting while driving. Text messaging has changed the way we communicate, and social movements and politics operate. In the recent political campaign, text messages were used to mobilize voters. To build a database of names and phone numbers and email addresses and it was significantly less expensive than any other form of database collection including personal visitation from home to home in the political campaign. In the year 2000, 17 billion SMS text messages were sent. In 2001 the number rose to 250 billion. By 2004, it had increased to 500 billion.

More headlines, 80% of the world’s population lives within range of a cell phone network and developing nations are leap-frogging  over the creation of physical infrastructure and making use of telephone technology without landlines. Digital media are redefining whole industries today, including of course, the communications industry itself. If you pick up any newspaper on almost any day, you’re very likely to read an article about how newspapers are being forced to change their economic model and the question, the legitimate question, is whether there is an economic model for newspapers in this day. The news editors who were interviewed by the Pew Internet Research Team (?) for the state of the news media study for 2008, say that there is no single finished news product any more. …..(?) news is continual. Do you hear that? There is no news cycle anymore. It’s a continual process. News is now web based and websites are no longer final destinations. They are stops along the way as we seek news. They are gateways to other places. They are the means to drill deeper, and they are becoming a service and not a product. One editor said the era of the wall garden is over. And by that he meant the idea that a website is a self contained territory has ended. The shift to news as a service is significant; the question the web user poses is this, “How can you help me? Even empower me?” But the digital media change is even broader than this. Cable now attracts 50% of the audience. Broadcast audiences continue to decline. Daily newspaper circulation has declined 8.4% at least in the year 2007 that was the decline in daily newspaper news. Online readership actually increased by 9% in the third quarter of the same year. So in one quarter more people went to the web to get their news from newspaper websites than in the whole year read from the daily newspaper.

Narrow casting and custom casting are increasing. Mass broadcast must compete with nitch audience narrow casting. It’s interesting, 94% of teen girls and 99% of teen boys play video games. Talking about narrow casting. It’s a social experience for most of them. 76% of adolescence say they play games with friends in person or online, creating online communities around video gaming. 99% of the young people in the U.S. have participated in this kind of online community.

Now move from the digital media to another kind of change that we need to take note of as we think about these headlines. Demographic changes are reshaping societies around the world. In the U.S. the Census Bureau says that persons identified as ethnic minorities today will outnumber non-Hispanic whites by the year 2042. By 2023 so called minority children will constitute a majority of the nation’s children under the age of 18. And by 2039 minorities will constitute the majority of working age persons. Globally, the year 2008 through which we have just passed marked the first time in human history that half the world’s population lives in urban areas. We are, for the first time in human history a majority urban dwelling population. 17% of us, or 1 billion, live in slums with inadequate police protection, sanitation and clean water. In 30 years, according to UN Habitat, another 1 billion of us will have moved into those same urban slums. This is the environment in which we are called to minister and to communicate the gospel. It is marked by a multiplicity of media, competition for mine space, changes in lifestyle and values, and continuous change. This requires adaptation and the ability to turn on a dime. That is not what institutions are designed to do.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine is when I go through these, each time I go through them and update them, my head spins a little bit more, but here’s something else that’s really necessary for us and the church, I think too, to begin to give serious thought to. Some knowledgeable observers point out that these media are reprogramming us. Nicholas Carter writing in the Atlantic points to a study conducted by University College in London, that says the way we read is changing due to the influence of the internet. The report says it is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of reading are emerging as users power browse horizontally through titles, content pages and abstracts, going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

The makers of new internet connection devices are looking at the keyboards that we use and are exploring new ways to configure the keyboards because we now have a generation that is reaching the age of maturity who have grown up with thumb keyboard s and who have greater thumb strength and dexterity then folks who did not grow up using those devices. And so Dell and Google and others are looking at the next generation of internet devices with the right kind of thumb keyboards that people can use to type using their thumbs.

The media are reprogramming us. Not only in our physical dexterity, but also in how we read and use and perceive information. And they’re changing us in other ways. Recently the centers for disease control and Google determine that aggregated Google searches for influenza indentified trends in flu outbreaks 10 days before the data collected through official public health chain could be compiled. And Google put up a flu trends website to track this data.

In this rapidly changing world, world of great media saturation and remarkable media change, we in religious communities have a very serious problem. Skepticism of religion is ripe. A recent study by Barna reports that 16 to 29 year olds are more critical of Christianity than previous generations. Only 16% of non-Christians in late teens and twenties, have a good impression of Christianity. 87% say it’s too judgmental and 85% say it’s hypocritical in the U.S., not in Africa or Europe. The figures in Europe would be even worse. After 8 years of public media exposure, the lining in this cloud, the silver lining in this cloud, if there is one, is that the United Methodist Church has been advertising and a recent Gallop survey of 10 religious groups reports that Methodists in general, they didn’t ask about the denomination, but they asked about Methodists, have the highest favorable perception of 10 major religious groups in this country, and that perception was a 96% favorable or neutral position. That is, some viewed us favorably and others did not view us unfavorably and in this environment that is positive.

So it’s with this research in had that United Methodist Communications is inviting seekers and the people of the United Methodist Church to rethink church. The question being posed is, “What if church were a verb and not a noun? What if we were to see ministry as opening our hearts, our minds and our doors? What if faith were about becoming engaged with the world?”

Rethink Church video

We are suggesting that in the United Methodist Church there are 10 thousand ways that we can offer this, 10 thousand doors. We’re building on the solid platform that has been laid in public media and local church training the past 8 years. The people of the United Methodist Church, Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors. You understand that that started as an attempt to identify, not the institution of the church because the research shows that people don’t identify with institutions, don’t join organizations in the same way today that they have in the past, that they seek out people of like mind and similar values who are sharing or can be of benefit to them in their search for meaning. And that became what we call, in marketing terms, the brain, the people of the United Methodist Church. But the promise is, that if you engage with us, you will experience open hearts, open minds, open doors. Well we’re now moving from that promise, while we hold it to be as true today as it was ever, to a more active expression – opening hearts together we can open minds and together we can open doors. This has been a very useful platform. It has allowed us to train 55 thousand individuals from 15 thousand local congregations in welcoming and hospitality. It has raised the awareness of the church from what some what called a generic, but unspecified identity when we began this campaign 8 years ago to today, a 40% awareness in unaided recalling. We are lowering the age of our target audience by sending messages to 18 to 34 years old and we are not abandoning the secondary audience, which is 35 plus. Through an integrative, interactive media we are also seeking a new measurement for these messages. And that measurement is engagement. A concept statement was tested in June of 2008 to see how United Methodists might distinguish themselves from the perception of other religious groups in the society and we used this statement, “Suppose there is a church that is rethinking church beyond Sundays and building, that offers solutions for daily life and opportunities for active participation in the world around you .” 44.5% of the targets said this sounds very appealing and an equal number said it sounds somewhat appealing for a 90% favorable response. Only 7% said it sounds like any other church. Our research makes it clear that the unchurched seek authenticity, a genuine welcome, words backed by works, and a call to action. Persons 18 to 34 years of age also say they want small groups, social networks where spiritual concerns deal with the intersection of faith and daily life, alternative ways to practice faith, a way to make a difference in the world, instant gratification and immediacy, a life away from work and a unique personal journey. Did you hear all that mix in there of an individualism and connection with others? It’s very interesting. If you were a sociologist and you wanted to analyze what is happening in this culture today, as a result of these media that once were individualistic and isolation is now giving a social networking through Facebook and people who want a unique journey, but want to be a part of a group of people who are changing the world. That is a very interesting, dynamic opportunity for faith to be introduced into the consideration of people who are searching for meaning.

We will deliver messages to them through a new media strategy that provides for yearlong exposure on TV as an anchor, but also includes higher reliance on life stage print media to reach particular audiences in a favorable environment and more interactive web presence through the 10 thousand doors website. We will also continue our breaking news strategy that has served us well and we will utilize peer-to-peer media, such as text messaging, social networking and other one-to-one media. We will also continue to use traditional media, such as newspaper, billboard, radio and church media. And we are exploring how to extend awareness of United Methodism globally through both high-tech and low-tech media, targeting Africa, Asia and Europe. In the U.S. we will buy fewer networks than we have used in the past. Where we know our audience is present, we will focus on those networks that are most productive in reaching this seeker audience that we are attempting to reach. This includes news, family and ethnic networks. We will also buy placement of ad copy adjacent to the spirituality column in Newsweek and use strategic buys in Parents magazine, National Geographic and Good magazine, a publication that targets young adults interested in social entrepreneurship and volunteerism. In our conversations with the magazines and advertisers we have discovered readership among young adults on a particular part of National Geographic is rather high and so while that looks like a very traditional medium with an older demographic, in fact there are in this mix, young readers who are picking up on particular issues and subjects in National Geographic. If you haven’t seen Good, it’s a very iconoclastic magazine. It probably will generate some controversy in the sense that it is so iconoclastic that there will be folks who will be somewhat concerned that we are adervisting in it. Not because of the nature, content, but because of the iconoclasm that exists. My experience in dealing with media today is that when I sit down as an old guy with young adults who are talking, they use a whole different language than I do, and they use a lot of words that I got my mouth washed out with soap for using when I was their age, and Good seems to attract that particular audience in that way. Not that it is overly rambunctious in that approach, but it’s a young adult publication for folks who are interested in social activism.

We’ve contracted with Google for a corporate search database and other services and are in the midst now of actually working with Google for that. They’ve been attempting to get corporations to work with them to create corporate search database capacity and have been unable to do it. So they’re really delighted that we have accepted their offer and are working so that our hope is that we will have a United Methodist search database that is unparalleled in ability to put in key words and go to a United Methodist website across the church for access. We will also create a YouTube United Methodist channel. We’re working with iTunes for podcasts and we have expanded our use of Facebook social networking. I hope if you haven’t already seen some of the work that United Methodist News Service has done using Facebook and Twitter that you will check those out. The coverage of the Inauguration was promoted on Facebook and Twitter. We sent a crew to the ivory coast for the distribution of bed nets and they were able to send back video stories and post them on Facebook using a very inexpensive iFlip camera, these little $100 hi-definition cameras that you plug into a laptop so that the stories were almost immediately accessible from the site in the ivory coast by way of the internet.

We’re also collecting data from local church profiles that we will link to Google Maps and some of this work is already underway and your local churches may already be invited or working on changing their entries on Find A Church, which is the most popular page on the denominational website, but it will allow us to link more information than we have been able to with our current software and we are also laying the plans for work to begin in Africa and Europe as well as the U.S. so that I’ll be working with Bishop Yunga(spelling?) in the Congo to develop Google Map sites for all of the local churches and mission sites in Congo as the first step and in March I’m going to the European Central Conference, Annual Conference, to talk with them about how we begin to document website information in Central Europe as well.

A key to the interactivity will be the 10 thousand doors website where a user can learn about various activities, and spore interests or seek more information about the church. At the present time, the website invites you to offer comments about the campaign and how you have changed the world if you had the opportunity to do so. So you can go to that site and share your thoughts with us and in some way we will use those and post those at a later time.

The four areas of focus of the church will be integral to the messages that we deliver over the next 4 years. My hope is that we will begin to be able to integrate what General Conference has set as the mission and ministry of the church through these 4 areas of focus so that they get reflected in the advertising that we do, and so that for the first time in the history of the church, that I am aware of, we will have our major media focus integrating messages that direct directly from General Conference and from the work of the church and its mission and ministry in a way that we’ve not been able to do before.

Finally, and perhaps the most important element of the campaign is not the media, but the local church training that provides an emphasis (?) for congregations to examine their life together and to explore how they reach out to their communities and welcome people into the community of faith. We have rewritten the training materials and are designing new training models that will launch simultaneously with the media and continue throughout the quadrenium. The materials will be available through rethinkchurch.org. Some of those are available now or in the month of February as Ken has indicated some of them are bypassing Nashville and going straight out to meetings like this for distribution. The campaign will actually launch on May 5^th and 6^th in the year 2009 through some events we are still planning, but with major focus in several key cities around the U.S. and those will be exciting events we think that they will generate some local news media coverage as well as some national coverage. They are really in the stage of the hiring of contractors in local cities to help us build awareness and activities and will be able to give you more details as we tie down agreements with annual conferences in cities where we think we can launch to get the best media coverage for the dollars that we have.

As I share the strategy around the church I hear great energy and great expectation. It provides us, I think, with something that I think we do need in the church, and that is the opportunity to have a global conversation about who we want to be as a people of faith, that dawn in the 21^st century, and how we will engage in ministry. Given all of these dynamics that we’ve talked about so far, it is a wonderful time of opportunity. I am excited about what we have committed ourselves to as a church and I’m excited about the conversation that I’m hearing as I move around the country and have a chance to talk with people and hear their response to this proposal that we Rethink Church. I hope that it excites you as well and that it generates conversation not only here this morning, but as we go back to local churches and present this idea to annual conferences  and to districts and to congregations and classes, and that we really do, as the people of The United Methodist Church, Rethink Church.

Thank you.

Five Questions for the Communication Enterprise in the Susquehanna Conference

1. Can we communicate a message in 90 seconds?
2. Can we describe in 26 words?
3. Can we write in half the words?
4. Can we be engaging?
5. Can we tap communication wealth?