I'm almost finished with The Long Tail and have loved thinking about the connections between the book's principles and observations and my own ministry philosophy and movement building principles.
Anderson, the author, defines our hit-driven media in the following way.
- A desperate search for one-size-fits-all products
- Trying to predict demand
- Pulling 'misses' off the market
- Limited choice
When I think about evangelism, in particular the tools we use for it, I'm realizing that we very much have a hit driven approach to developing evangelistic tools. Once again, our top-down model requires an evangelistic tool to fit all of these aforementioned categories, because they are thinking in light of the country.
If instead we could begin to develop niche-driven evangelistic tools from the ground up that would require less investment, contain more customization, easy to discard and have a short self-life, we may begin to see more evangelistic effectiveness. Also, our resources might be stewarded more in line with the real needs of college students, not perceived ones.
I love the process of developing Soularium, one of CCC's newest evangelistic tools. They actually beta-tested it on a few college campuses of different ethnic and geographic places, modified it, and then released it. I thought this was a huge step forward because it solicited field input that actually affected the product! So many of our tools are handed to us, without any input on our part. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
I would love to see more regional and even cultural niche-evangelism tools developed. What if we partnered with IV to develop 200 new evangelistic tools, each geared toward a specific cultural or ethnic niche group? I wonder if we would see an increase in not only our external evangelistic effectiveness, but also our internal--meaning would multiple and context-specific tools actually inspire students to share their faith more?
