The Necessary Things

Conversion/Converting in Evangelism

C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) - 2a

What does this mean? I received this formula from Jeanne Hopkins, during the amazing Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco last week. I believe it has parallels to how we think about ministry in general and evangelism in particular.

Here's a description of each element of the formula:

• C-Probablity of conversion

• M-motivation of user

• V-clarity of value proposition (why)

• A-anxiety about entering information giving you their credit card, personal, etc

• F-friction elements of process; impedes the person from completing the action you want them to take

• I-incentive to take action, things you sweeten up the deal with

When I think about evangelism in a postmodern context versus that of a modern context, and apply this formula loosely, here's what I notice:

• M has significantly decreased, yet we as Christians expect the M to be the same as it was during the modern era.
• V has declined from a failure to experiment and try new methods that clarify the value proposition or heart of the Gospel.
• A has exponentially increased, yet believers often perceive it as a linear one. In most of my experiences the greatest barrier to an honest evangelistic conversation is trust.
• I the incentive for the non-Christian to accept the message has changed, yet many times we are still offering an incentive that appealed to moderns. 

Very curious to hear your thoughts. What do you think has changed, positively or negatively in evangelism? What other insights does this formula surface in your mind?

Blogference Day 3--Saving Cultural Christians

"So if you were to explain the Gospel to your friends, what would you say?"

Kelley Otto, one of our staff here at Chico State, follows up every person she meets on campus during evangelism who claims to be a Christian with this question. I'm inspired by her courage and intentionality as in many cases the question reveals signs of a lack of saving faith.

Ken's blogged about It's Not Our Job To Reach Everyone. A growing category of students that we do have the opportunity to reach is cultural Christians, as many of them are in our movements, often times completely unaware that they are in fact a false front like the image above.

During our most recent outreach we had a student go out and share the Gospel on one day, and then check the box that they trusted Christ for the first time at our meeting the next day. As we discussed this issue and debriefed the outreach the underlying question became, 'How can we help cultural Christians discern whether they in fact are saved?'

I'm curious to hear your experiences and particularly if you have been able to have conversations with students that have been fruitful in producing either awareness or a genuine decision for Christ.

Some observations from my experience:

• Many of these students are often prideful, materialistic, and self-centered. In many cases the soil of their hearts feels harder than that of a raw, party-going student that revels in their unbelief.
• Some of these students demonstrate that they probably are but might not be saved. Often times I find myself waiting for an official sign so to speak that they are not saved so that I can engage this issue.
• I've yet to discern what knowledge and experiences they need to be assured of their salvation. For me personally it was the understanding of the Holy Spirit and the real life experiences that demonstrated his activity in my life. I'm not sure that this resonates as much with today's student, as so many exude this spiritual pretentiousness and 'feeling spiritual' with the work of the Holy Spirit.

Some Initial Questions:

• What percentage of students in your movement/ministry/etc would you estimate are culturally Christian? Have you seen this grow, decline, or stay the same in the last couple years?
• What are you doing about it? Have you engaged in any sort of training of staff and student leaders that specifically addresses this problem?
• It seems as though our job in CCC has become more complex in this realm. Especially in the Fall or gathering season of ministry, we now reach out to worldly non-believers, mobilize believers, AND follow up cultural Christians. Have you experienced this complexity? How have you responded? What changes have you made to adapt to this reality?

Blogference Day 2--Free The Tools!

Yesterday's comments encouraged and sharpened me! The beauty of the blogference lies in its ability to include a broad range of participants that a physical conference rarely includes.

If you have the time, I would encourage you to check out the online radio show Dan Birch and I hosted yesterday--Moving From a Tool to Tools Mentality in Evangelism. It can easily be added to iTunes to be savored at a later time :) Alex Costa graciously called in and shared some challenging thoughts with us.

One of the realizations I recently made is how similar our role on staff is to an entrepreneur. I'm not sure why it took me so long to make that connection. Actually if you have yet to think of your role on staff as such I'd encourage you to read one of my posts from last year on Redeeming Our Apostolic Calling. 

As I scour many entrepreneur blogs I realize they possess two things that are often in short supply in CCC: money and courage. Many of them have learned valuable lessons that can be applied to ministry and evangelism. 

Josh Kopelman, a Venture Capitalist and entrepreneur, brings to light the importance of free in the process of any new venture:

Most entrepreneurs fall into the trap of assuming that there is a consistent elasticity in price - that is, the lower the price of what you're selling, the higher the demand will be...The truth is, scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny. --from his post The Penny Gap

When developing evangelistic tools, the same principle applies. Just as we seek to remove any intangible obstacles that a person faces in trusting Christ, we must remove any physical obstacles such as cost that can significantly restrict a Gospel tool's efficacy. 

I love the steps our Global Short Film Network have taken to produce and distribute culturally relevant, high quality evangelistic short-films. My campus (Chico State in Northern California) used the films during our evangelism training time and our recent Spring semester outreach. However, when I apply  Kopelman's Penny Gap (click to see diagram) to this evangelistic tool, I notice these things in relation to cost:

• They cost $1.99. Two bucks you say? What's the big deal: "I can't think of a single premium (meaning one that costs anything) service that has acheived truly viral distribution."--Kopelman. Cost inherently restricts distribution. An evangelistic tool cannot spread virally when it costs even a penny!
• They cost 8 Clicks: 1 click to go to site, 1 click to go to 'Films', 1 click or more to select the content I want, 1 click to check-out and proceed to payment, 1 click to register (assuming I'm a new customer), 1 click to sign up, 1 click to confirm payment, 1 click to start the download process. In internet time that compares to four hours in the real world--not exactly but you see what I mean.
• They cost cultural credibility: NOT in quality, BUT in platform. What comes to mind when you hear 'have you seen this YouTube video?' Probably some inappropriate things, but overall I think 'funny, universal, popular.' Let's be honest when a non-believer on campus hears 'Campus Crusade for Christ' I do not believe those same words come to mind. 

Here's another blog snippet from this post that offers helpful distinction when I think about freeing up our evangelistic tools (from another venture capitalist and entrepreneur Andrew Chen:

• Viral Branding--Do something really cool and people will tell their friends.
• Viral Action--Do something that is really easy to spread to other people.

I would love to see evangelistic tools with viral action. Even our summer project videos do not have the kind of viral action they could.

• Type in the phrase 'campus crusade for christ summer project' into the search bar on YouTube. You get this, but why didn't this video come up? The title is 'Hooray Viral Video' It has an element of Viral Branding but severely lacks in Viral Action. 

Brian: Why are you such a buzzkill when it comes to CCC videos?

• Because FREE, CULTURALLY RELEVANT, AND MASSIVELY POPULAR PLATFORMS exist--YouTube, Facebook, MySpace.
• Because FREE, CULTURALLY RELEVANT, AND MASSIVELY POPULAR CONTENT exists--Josh Otto, one of the staff here at Chico, shared how effective secular movie clips, shown on an portable media player could be in evangelism. He gave the example of the scene from The Dark Knight when the two boats faced the decision of whether to detonate the other and save themselves.
• Because The Penny Gap limits the transferability of ANY premium evangelistic tool. The beauty of the 4 Laws is in its transferability, as so many staff mentioned yesterday. To harness the power of social media in evangelism its has to have the viral action that facilitates transferability.

I'm hammering away on this one because I believe that there is someone out there with the ability to produce a culturally relevant, massively popular, viral action, evangelistic tool that could affect millions. Unless we as an organization die to this premium model philosophy in not only evangelism but in other areas as well (a great topic for the next blogference), we should not be surprised at our lackluster results in spite of a high investment of resources.

I do believe our videos are producing tremendous results. However, in light of the potential for viral content to scale (David After Dentist is currently at 18,679,668 views), I believe we have tremendous room for improvement.

Kelly Cain has some great thoughts on the power to use social media to create movements.

A few questions to kick-off the discussion:

• What are some physical obstacles you see in either our current tools or in developing new ones?
• Have you done anything in your ministry that would qualify as viral branding or viral action? What kinds of results did each produce?
• Have you experimented with using secular media as a means of starting an evangelistic conversation?
• What role has mobile (cell-phones, iPhones, blackberries, Zunes, iPods) played in evangelism on your campus or in your ministry? Where would you like to go with it? What would you like to do if you had money and courage?

Blogference Day 1--The Death of the Four Spiritual Laws

From the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1951.

Look at the US Government's racial categories on the far left. The crude racial distinctions seem to be from another world. Yet Dr. Bright engendered The Four Spiritual Laws in this environment. 

I'm shocked when I stop to think about how long The Four Laws has lasted as CCC's primary evangelistic tool given the dramatic cultural and philosophic changes that have happened since 1952. It's amazing that something developed over fifty years ago still powerfully influences people for Christ even to this day. Yet there seems to be a growing sense that it's efficacy is dwindling, especially in the US. 

I'm not advocating killing the Four Spiritual Laws as an evangelistic tool---I am advocating killing the Four Spiritual Laws as THE evangelistic tool. Instead of having one 'blockbuster' tool, we need to have many 'indie' tools that speak and target specific groups of people instead of the masses. 

The person for whom Dr. Bright developed the tool rarely exists on today's college campus: a modern-minded white, upper-middle class student from a single income, dual-parent household where Christianity was the family religion. With so much cultural and religious diversity on campus, it's pretentious to think that one tool can adequately satisfy all of the evangelistic demands.

I would love to discuss what it would look like to shift from a GENERAL/MASSES driven perspective on evangelistic tool production to a SPECIFIC/NICHE driven one.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson addresses the changing forces the world is undergoing. He says this about the demise of the general/masses driven perspective:

"Today there seems to be less demand for blockbusters than there is for focused or targeted content that isn’t for everybody!"--The Long Tail pg. 82

Although 'targeted content that isn't for everybody' sounds inherently un-evangelistic, I believe it's the place we need to move evangelistically. It's not because The Four Laws does a poor job communicating the Gospel--it is because we have an unprecedented opportunity to develop specific/niche driven evangelistic tools that are highly effective for some, and completely ineffective for all.

Anderson explains how this is possible:

• Democratization of Production: "The best example of this is the personal computer, which has put everything from the printing press to the film and music studios in the hands of anyone...Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge." --The Long Tail pg. 54
• Democratization of the Distribution Process: "The PC made everyone a producer or publisher, but it was the Internet that made everyone a distributor."--Ibid pg.54
• Connecting Supply and Demand: "This can take the form of anything from Google's wisdom of crowds search to iTunes' recommendations, along with word of mouth, from blogs to customer reviews."--Ibid pg. 56. People no longer have to settle for content that kind of fits--these changes have made it easy for people to find exactly what they are looking for.

As I examine these three forces, I am convinced that the next generation of effective evangelistic tools WILL be developed from the fringes. We cannot wait for our president or national office to lead us in this area. The tools to develop and distribute relevant, effective, and specific Gospel content demand that we pioneer evangelism on the local level.

I would love to see more evangelistic tools with the following characteristics:

• Less polished and rough around the edges--even unfinished and dependent on use for completion--move the lab from Lake Hart to the Campus baby!
• Focused on one part of the Gospel rather than the whole--why not something just on the atonement, or solely focused on exposing God's love or wrath or ________?
• Short shelf life--developed with the mindset that it will be used for a specific amount of time.
• Built on secular platforms (more on this later...)--YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter. Why do we continue to build tools that are incompatible with these social media giants?

Some questions to kick-off the discussion:

• Why do you think CCC still has a silver bullet mentality when it comes to evangelism? What steps have you taken locally or organizationally to change this?
• What are the drawbacks to moving to a niche-driven mentality? What are you fears?
• What excites you about pioneering new evangelistic tools? What characteristics would you like to be true of them?
• Are you fearful of experimenting evangelistically or developing new evangelistic tools? What keeps you from innovating on your campus?

Evangelism Discussion on BlogTalkRadio Recap

My staff team hosted an impromptu online radio talk show this morning on BlogTalkRadio. It started out as a way to test the platform for the upcoming Blogference, but it turned into an enjoyable and inspiring conversation.

Some highlights:

• Four of us spent just 20 minutes promoting the show via Facebook, text, and email. We saw at least 45 people listen into the show. It was amazing to be using social media to host and promote the show! Extremely powerful demonstration of social media.
• Global Platform: Our show was airing alongside professional and other amateur shows that spanned many different categories. Anyone could listen in and there were definitely non-believers who trusted the site.
• Wide-Range of Listeners: We had students from our movement listening in, other CCC staff, and one of our staff member's father who is also a pastor. I loved that the dialogue was not contained or restricted to a specific group of people.

If you would like to listen in, click here.

I'm hosting an extended conversation on evangelism next Monday at 2pm.

Hearing But Not Listening to the Gospel--Propaganda Part 2

from the movie White Men Can't Jump...

[ Purple Haze Playing ]

Hey...what is this?

Jimi Hendrix.

 
I know.
Why are you playing Jimi?

 
Because I like
to listen to him.

 
That's the problem.
Y'all listen.

 
What am I supposed to do.
eat it?

 
No. You're supposed
to hear it.

 
I said I like to
listen to him.

 
There's a difference between
hearing and listening.

 
White people can't
hear Jimi. You listen.

The content of the Gospel can never be compromised or boiled down to interrogatives, however the approach and bridge building must change from confrontational/intellectual to a conversational/heart manner. Otherwise, we risk speaking to that part of a person's soul that is listening but cannot hear.

Two of the comments from the first post tapped into this idea:

We'll need to be intentional, or take initiative, anytime we seek to share the gospel. Because there is a level of 'offensiveness' (that we can't get around) in The Cross, we will have to take initiative to put it out there even when we fear that it will offend people we don't want to offend. However, my conviction is that we must be overly intentional to make everything else about our interaction inoffensive, leaving the content of the gospel to either offend or transform.--Dave Goffeney

We encourage people to seek God, but are hesitant to show how to find Him, lest we be labeled “narrow-minded” and thus offend their post-modern sensibilities. There are too many interrogatives and not enough indicatives in our presentation of Christianity. Our feigned uncertainty is spiritual dishonesty, and ambiguity is just a failure to communicate clearly.--Mike Gregg

I'm so encouraged by the conversation that Propaganda-less Evangelism sparked. This discussion and wrestling with how to most effectively and powerfully communicate the Gospel to a post-modern audience is obviously happening in our heads and with other believers.

I've noticed that too often students seek to go after the philosophical arguments before establishing enough rapport and relational connection to share the Gospel effectively. I have observed that a key part of an evangelistic conversation is helping the non-believer see us as personal and human. It is far too easy for them to write us off as hypocrites who just want to convert them, and starting with philosophic arguments or combative methods only harden the soil.

As Dave keenly noted, for non-believers to feel the full weight of the Gospel, we must extract as much inoffensive-ness as possible from our interaction, leaving no room for them to justify their lack of faith or apathy towards Jesus.

Here's the best line from White Men Can't Jump:

What are you talking about?
His drummer was white.

Would love to hear your thoughts. Let's keep the conversation rolling... 

Just the Facts...Not So Much Anymore

Here are two realities that I and my staff team have frequently experienced when sharing the Gospel on campus:

• The worldview and data of most non-believers has become dramatically distant from the worldview and data of the Gospel.

• Information in general has become so abundant through the web to the degree that sharing new information with people does not generates less excitement/curiosity than ever before.

The conversations that I would describe as successful result when I'm able to listen well enough to ask questions and share how the Gospel connects with their heart, passions, and talents. Many staff sense that meaning has become the new destination, not information.

Concluding a conversation without connecting how the information of the Gospel might be relevant and meaningful to the listener usually produces an awkward ending. The listener is often unimpressed with the information of the Gospel, and we are frustrated at the listener for not valuing the information.

Some new tools have surfaced to connect with this demand for meaning--Soularium uses pictures to bridge a conversation about what is meaningful or not to the listener, which then gives a platform one to share how the Gospel more specifically to the listener. There are also some new short movies that can be downloaded on an iPod and used similarly.

I don't know if there will ever be a general evangelistic tool that's as effective as the Four Spiritual Laws. I do see tremendous potential in developing many tools that allow believers to tailor and contextualize the Gospel to the listener's heart, passions and talents.

Hit-Driven Evangelism...

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?

Making the Gospel More/Less Popcorn

Great marketing insight from Seth Godin...

"The thing about popcorn is that it is a low investment, low risk snack. You can eat it if you're not hungry. You can successfully have a tiny portion. You are virtually certain that it will taste very much like your last popcorn snack.

There are products that are as easy to sample as popcorn. And making your product more popcorn-like is a great idea.

At the same time, it's interesting to note that very few people make a lot of money from popcorn. For a product this ubiquitous, it's surprisingly unsuccessful. Coke and Nike and Marlboro are a lot more powerful than Jiffy Pop.

So, the second lesson is that you want to make the sampling popcorn-like, but the commitment to be far bigger than it is for popcorn. Easy trial and consistent quality can lead to low commitment, not a great combination.

How do we make this more like popcorn? How do we make it less like popcorn?"

I couldn't help but think about how to relate this to the Gospel. The first month of school we seek to give students who have never heard about Jesus a popcorn-type experience of him. The desire is that they would taste who he is yet experience him in a way that's contextualized to their expectations. One of the insights I took away from our time of staff planning was that often times we serve 'meaning' to students who are not hungry for it. We then get frustrated when students do not come to a meeting or show more interest, even though we're offering them something that they don't perceive to be valuable.

The Gospel has to have a popcorn element to it when shared with people unfamiliar to its message. Otherwise, we risk serving something that's not desired or over-stuffing someone with meaning. Christians who have been Christians for a while (like me) can place unrealistic expectations on non-Christians, expecting them to desire the same level of depth and meaning as we do. That reflects arrogance on my part for thinking that others should want what I want in the way I want it.

So adapting Seth's question, I wonder: How do we make the Gospel more like popcorn? How do we make it less like popcorn?

Gospel Narrative Part 2--Why Not More Tools?

"If media companies are ultimately "pipes" companies - ones that primarily focus on distribution - what is their incentive to serve the consumer? I think that in the tech world, when we've seen this happen with Microsoft when it achieved superior distribution leverage relative to all its competitors. It creates perverse incentives to to try to squeeze whatever you can out of consumers, rather than innovating new products to serve them. And I'd argue that a lot of what we see in the entertainment industry - endless sequels, manufactured pop bands, child-actor-to-paparazzi-bait actresses - are all indicators that this is already happening.

Why take content risk when you can just out-distribute and out-promote whatever you want?

Is the Mummy 3 the entertainment equivalent of Windows Vista? (I guess I shouldn't be too harsh, after all the movie hasn't released and I haven't seen it yet - maybe it will be good!)"

This is from a recent post by Andrew Chen, a Bay-Area entrepreneur. The quotes before and after the red serve as context for the heart of the issue that resonated with me: Developing new content is a risk if you have tremendous resources invested in old content.

After seeing Choung's 4 Circles presentation on YouTube, and reading the article from Christianity Today, I have been left to ponder why in the 57 years of Campus Crusade has only 1 evangelistic tool received the lion's share of resource allocation? I believe the answer lies within Chen's post--there is a risk and fear of distributing new evangelistic content, especially when the old has worked so well for so long, and that most financial donors that enable us to develop resources are rooted in a One Tool/One Presentation mentality.

I truly believe the next 50 years of evangelism, at least in the U.S., will see a shift from One Tool/One Presentation mentality to Many Tools/Many Presentations mentality. Hopefully the resource allocation will follow that shift. Hopefully instead of investing money in 'The Next 4 Laws,' Campus Crusade and other evangelistic ministries and churches will invest resources in developing tools for different ethnicities, religions, regions, cities, AS WELL AS different medias--photo, video, and print.

A fellow staff member Kevin Lamb mentioned he wanted to explore evangelistic resources that use short-videos that could either be downloaded and presented via an iPod, Zune, etc, or presented via YouTube on an iPhone, Blackberry, etc. An idea like this would never come out of a One Tool/One Presentation mindset.

To get there we as evangelistic leaders need to abandon the expectation that we will come up with THE next best evangelistic tool, and embrace the reality that we can come up with A great evangelism tool that should be used as one of many tools in our evangelistic tool-box.