Take Back Media, Please.

Churches choosing not to create media while at the same time buying their children devices to consume media is CRAZY. 

Media/art are powerful, and to my discouraged heart, it feels like everyone BUT the Church knows it. Want to make someone cry? Get one on Apple Music and play on a sad song. Want someone to laugh? Get on Netflix and turn on a standup special. Want to make someone sit still for 2 hours? Get on Disney Plus and queue up a movie. Want someone’s undivided attention for 45 minutes? Hop on Spotify and pop on a podcast. Want to feed someone’s soul a narrative about where their affections should lie, where they should find purpose and value, and how they should go about doing that? Make a TikTok. 

Generation Z and Generation Alpha are consuming content at an alarming rate. They are on TikTok. They are on Instagram. They are on YouTube. Whether you like it or not, my generation, and probably every generation to come after will be on Twitter, Netflix, Crunchyroll, HBO, Disney Plus, Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Call of Duty, Rocket League, twitch discord… etcetera. 

Here’s the thing: Social media is shaping the cultural narrative and informing/ teaching us how to think and what to think. Content is shaping hearts and minds; souls. Narrative - especially cultural/social narrative - is an incredibly powerful tool, and it feels as though the church has voluntarily chosen to disengage from having a voice in it. 

The terrifying truth is the Church used to be the center of culture and art… but we simply no longer are. The pulpit has very limited power when it comes to affecting cultural narrative. Should we do away with the pulpit? Let me be very clear: NO. That’s not what I’m suggesting (so don’t you dare attempt to put those words in my mouth). What I am suggesting is that the average teen is on their phone somewhere between 6 and 8 hours a day, and they are in a worship service about 1 hour every week. You do the math. 

Actually, I’ll do the math for you. Let’s take the median numbers of the data set of 6 to 8 hours: that’s 7 hours. There are 7 days in a week, so to get the weekly average for how often a teenager is on their phone, you need to multiply the 7 hours by the 7 days in a week. That’s 49 hours of phone time each week. This number, by the way, isn’t counting time spent on their laptops, gaming consoles, smart TVs, or iPads. So, the average teenager is taking in information from the secular world and culture for at least 49 hours a week. They listen to their pastor teach for somewhere between 30 to 45 minutes a week. Let’s be super generous and say they hear 60 minutes (or 1 hour) of teaching from the pulpit twice a week (this simply isn’t the sake but I’m feeling generous). This would mean that they are ingesting truth from the pulpit for about 2 hours a week (by the way, this assumes a good pastor, with a good understanding of the word, which many churches don’t have). That’s a ratio of 49:2 or 24.5:1, meaning, that for every 1 hour of pulpit input, they are receiving 24 hours of input from their phones. Again, this assumes a favorably low number for screen time and a favorably high number for pulpit time. If I had to guess, the ratio is probably more like 60:1. That’s such a staggering number it genuinely makes my stomach hurt. 

“But we DO have an Instagram!” I hear Pastors responding. No, you don’t. You have a digital bulletin board, that your young adults and youth have muted. Your glorified digital bulletin board isn't you intentionally leveraging social media to go make disciples in all nations. It's you checking the box so you don't have to wrestle with how to effectively use it. 

Church family, your amount of input into your flock’s weekly life, as it stands, is a very generous 1:24.5. For every hour your youth hears you teach the good news, they intake an entire day’s worth of narrative from the world. You have almost no input into their daily lives, but the big bad ‘culture’ boogieman does. 

So why don’t we engage on those platforms? Pride and Fear, mostly. We are afraid of something that we don’t understand, afraid of becoming like the culture. We don’t want a “platform.” So here’s a hard pill to swallow: I'm sick and tired of church families refusing to leverage something as simple as Instagram because they are afraid of having a platform (from which they could talk about Jesus). We're more afraid of being like Joel Olsteen or Steven Furtick than we are excited and eager to use every tool available to tell people about Jesus and it makes me sick. We don’t want to be all things to all people. We want to be a cute little local clubroom where we talk about Jesus. Then, we pretend to be 'working' on it. We act like social media and content creation is the greatest unsolved mystery since the Zodiac Killer. It's crazy that these words are being said in this order, but: Put on your big boy pants, start acting like an adult, and make a freaking TikTok. And if you don't know how, ask for help (you are, in fact, allowed to ask for help).

Take back art. It never belonged to the culture to begin with. Be good stewards, brothers and sisters, for our master is coming back for his talents. 

If you are someone in ministry who genuinely wants to leverage social media but feels overwhelmed and needs some help, I'd love to hop on a call with you and walk you through tangible things you can do to make content. It's easier than you'd think :)

“The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.”

―C.S. Lewis