The above chart, courtesy of Techcrunch, shows the steady decline of an email legend and the ascent of a legend-in-the-making: AOL and Gmail.
I remember vividly the days of AOL and the “You’ve Got Mail” message that I literally prayed for every time I waited for my 28k modem to connect to the interwebs.
Now, though, AOL is a far-distant memory; I haven’t used it in more than a decade.
But reading the article I was quickly reminded of a particular challenge that the Church doesn’t necessarily have to deal with and how blessed it is to be developing applications in a ministry setting: Competition.
The graph speaks to a number of things but ultimately many of the paths land back on the business of developing products, and the business of developing products is making money, and making money is about being better than your competition.
The Church, though, doesn’t have to deal with this: We aren’t in competition with each other to create the best, fastest, or prettiest product; our goal, rather, is to make the most effective web apps and services that are contextually-based and specific to our ministries, demographics, and callings.
I like that.
We’re not competing with each other for bandwidth or traffic or praise, we’re competing with ourselves to provide the most effective communication tools and platforms for the Gospel message. Our goal is to be better than we we’re yesterday at doing what we know we need to be doing in the web space.
Great thoughts John. I especially love it when churches share their technology with other churches.
i love that too.
I completely agree John. Though I wonder if there is such a dearth of competition as you suggest.
While churches are not in competition with each other to make money, how often do they compete for attenders? How often do they try to add programs and tools so that they can grow just that much more? How often do the small churches get discouraged that they can't put up the nice flashy websites that the big churches do? (No offense…)
good point daniel, and i know that since we're fallen and sinful people we almost can't help it… competition does exist, perhaps not as explicitly…
sad.
Well, competition can be good. It does drive us to do things better or cheaper or faster.
But no, straight up "I have more members than you!" competition between churches is not helpful. Churches should be helping each other, not trying to beat one another.
Church, the original open-source
i love that dude. and very cool blog, btw.
there seems to be a lot less competition between churches even in the offline world. if there is, it's usually the new guy
now that's amazing! coz really being better than oneself is the right way to go!