is there an app for that?
I work for a Christian school which is affiliated with a very large church over in Highlands Ranch. Please, lay aside your knee-jerk cynicism about Suburbia, megachurch, and whatever else you’re feeling cynical about when I say “Highlands Ranch.” I work in IT Support, running the help desk for the school and church staff. It’s busy, fun, consistent work and I’m enjoying it immensely.
Yesterday, I was helping one of the senior pastors of the church with his computer. As we waiting for this-and-that update to finish, he told me about an article he’d been reading about a growing number of large churches deploying custom iPhone apps for their congregations. These apps offer everything from event information and news, directions around larger church campuses, and interactive media to “enhance” the churchgoing experience. This pastor then asked, referring to himself as an “old curmudgeon,” what someone from my generation thinks about that. He himself was having a hard time seeing the point, especially when this article demonstrated clearly that in almost every instance of churches deploying their apps, use of the software spiked upward in the first 1 - 2 months, before dropping out almost entirely.
I thought about it. The best answer I could come up with was this:
“Everyone is trying to sell my generation something. Everyone. And I think that a church coming to my generation with a new iPhone app would just feel really inauthentic and disingenuous. It’d be someone with something shiny saying to young people, ‘come over to our church! Look at our cool apps!’ I can’t understand what the purpose would be.”
I was glad he nodded. Not only because he’s the boss of all my bosses, and it’d stink to have made a fool of myself in his office, but also because he completely shattered my perception of this man in a big office in a big church. He’s not interested in bigger, shinier, newer. He just wants to do good things for the people coming to the church. It’s kind of hard to stay cynical around a man like that.
He has no interest in these shiny new apps. But it made me wonder.
Does church need apps? I can’t help but tire of this endless need for churches to be more and more “relevant.” How long are we going to act like we are peddlers in a competitive market?
There. That’ll be my one snarky comment for this post.
