It really REALLY annoys me when someone suggests that we should do more to accommodate tech illiterate people during this time.

For the last 6 months of my life, I have been working really hard to engage people with church in a new way. In a season of Covid19 I have moved the Sunday Worship Service online, inventing along the way what that might look like.

I made important choices, for instance I eschewed livestream in favor of prerecorded services on YouTube, because livestreaming (while familiar to church leaders) does not make sense when there is not a present audience watching something live, and because with prerecorded and premiered content, we can provide better content, at higher resolution, that is enjoyably rewatchable, and easier to access. We don’t have users dealing with downtime and that sort of stuff.

I have rebuilt the church website, I have invented online tithing for our church (although we still get most of our donations in the mail) I’ve started ministries online and gone to meetings on zoom, made tutorial videos, and been on phone calls, revamped my social media, the church’s social media, and our email communications. And in everything I did I had an eye, to how each of these changes would effect change-averse elderly parishioners who were not comfortable with tech, and yet were the most vulnerable to this virus.

And there are people out there saying that what I really ought to do is focus on those people sommore.

NO!

You do not understand.

Like it or not this has been a time we have been forced to embrace tech, and this is what it looks like when we do that in the most familiar, novice-friendly, accommodating way possible. If i was ignoring people who disliked tech, I would just have opened a Discord day one. Everything is on discord, install it, get yourself a mic, we are going to play Tabletop Sim a lot together, so pick up a copy, let’s leverage telepresence and meet new people.

I haven’t done that.

It’s a golden hour for the church to reach gamers, bloggers, YouTubers, influencers… generally all of generation Y and Z. And most churches haven’t done any of that. And the reason they haven’t, is because they have been working full time to simulate the church experience they used to have in person which appealed to Baby Boomers in a way that was safe for them.

We do not need more ways to coddle and comfort older parishioners.

That’s important work that needs to be done. It has been done. It cannot be to the exclusion of all else. No. Not more of that.

Actions speak louder than words. Words speak too.

As a church, in this time, both our actions and our words are shouting that Boomers matter, and Zoomers don’t.

And that’s why your churches have no young people involved.