Filed under: church
at my church, they’re in the midst of a teaching series on doubts. in a nice attempt at creating a bit more of a communication loop, they invited people to text message questions during the sermon — questions about points that needed more clarification, or about related doubts and questions. at various points during the sermon, the teaching pastor stopped and some of the questions appeared on the screen, where he read them out loud and took a stab at responding to them. it brought greater clarity to some of the issues being addressed, and brought up some great ancillary discussion. for a large church, this worked way better than having an open mic where people could ask questions, as it was substantially quicker, and allowed for some pre-screening of the questions. it also allowed people to ask questions who would not normally make their way to a mic to ask something in front of a room of 1000 people.
12 Comments so far
Leave a comment
Awesome. Someone should post about how to set that up easily.
Comment by Lars Rood 10.01.06 @ 10:24 pmDid they put the text on the screen or did someone type it on powerpoint and put that on the screen?? This is a good idea
Comment by Dave Frank 10.01.06 @ 10:42 pmapparently, someone was receiving the text messages, screening them, and choosing which ones to put on the screen. this gave them the chance for screening, and also to clean up the wording and spelling. pretty simple process, really — though it would have involved at least two people (one getting the texts and screening them, and a second person formatting them onto a screen).
Comment by marko 10.01.06 @ 11:30 pmI first heard about this when the highschool pastor at my church did this. The way he does this is he has the students text a message to a yahoo email address, and then someone on the “tech team” receives the email, and usually reads it to him. Chuckk reads markos blog, so maybe he can explain it a little better if I did it wrong. But I thought it was a really cool idea to reach this generation.
Comment by Randy 10.01.06 @ 11:47 pmWhat a cool idea! : ) My church is small enough we could just open it up for questions, but I’ve never thought about doing it … could be a very cool change. How much time did your pastor give to Q & A? Was his message shorter to factor that in? Or did the time come from something else?
Comment by 10.02.06 @ 8:47 amThat is a great idea. Especially because of the pre-screening part.
Comment by David Mackey 10.02.06 @ 9:11 amI love the concept, but doesn’t this just translate into one REALLY long sermon?
Comment by adam 10.02.06 @ 10:30 amadam — i think there are two ‘timing’ issues that are important:
1. planning a shorter message to allow time for this, and
2. keeping responses short
Hey Randy you posted a comment here too. Yep we’ve been doing this for a while
details of how were doing this r on my blog if you want more info: use the search box on my page and type in “txt” to get to the correct post
our next development in the process is to have the text appear on teh screens ( includin my video monitor) with a youve got mail kinds of sound and grafic ( after they have been screened in the back)>
Comment by chuckk gerwig 10.02.06 @ 10:09 pmso does this mean we can text you questions during your general session in Austin?
Comment by Len 10.02.06 @ 11:32 pmLeave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
I do this when I am teaching in our youth ministry…
Comment by James 10.01.06 @ 6:19 pm