Digital Discipleship

In one of the first con­ver­sa­tions I remem­ber hav­ing with Scott Aught­mon, he tried to sell me on the advan­tages of using sequen­tial autore­spon­ders down­load evil under the sun

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in min­istry. I had no idea what he was talk­ing about, so I smiled and nod­ded.

Turns out they’re awe­some. I wish I had lis­tened to him soon­er.

Con­sid­er the case of Dick Schroed­er. He speaks at retreats and fre­quent­ly prays with peo­ple to be bap­tized in the Holy Spir­it. Over the years, he has put togeth­er a series of emails that he sends to peo­ple after­wards to coach them from a dis­tance.

One day he asked me if there was a way to auto­mate the process. My mind flashed back to Scot­t’s enthu­si­asm for these autore­spon­der things, so I down­loaded a free PHP script called Infi­nite Respon­der

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and set up http://chialpha.com/resources/holyspirit.

Now if some­one signs up, they begin receiv­ing coach­ing emails from Dick once a week. Since the mes­sages appear to come from his email address, stu­dents can just hit “reply” and ask Dick about any­thing they found con­fus­ing or that they need spe­cial advice about. It’s very low-main­te­nance for him, and Chi Alpha stu­dents nation­wide get a year’s worth of Dick­’s exper­tise.

Since rolling this out at the World Mis­sions Sum­mit (Jan 1st), we’ve had just over 200 peo­ple sub­scribe to these updates. That works out to about 7 signups a day. I have no idea where the total will cap out, but momen­tum is build­ing and I don’t even feel that the resource has been thor­ough­ly pub­li­cized yet.

Things I like about the tool:

  • Low-tech. geron­i­mo down­load

    It’s just email. No one has to install a spe­cial plu­g­in, put head­phones in their com­put­er, or have some insane­ly fast con­nec­tion.

  • Per­son­al. The emails come from an actu­al human being to whom you can respond.
  • Low-main­te­nance. Once the email is in the data­base, it’s just there. Nei­ther Dick nor I need to do any­thing spe­cial to send them out. And Dick only gets replies from peo­ple who have spe­cif­ic ques­tions, which is only a frac­tion of the peo­ple who receive any giv­en email.

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Pret­ty cool, eh?

Late­ly I’ve been won­der­ing what oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties are out there. Some ideas that I’ve had:

  • Emails for new believ­ers
  • A “40 days” type cam­paign for Chi Alpha with dai­ly emails where each cam­pus that choos­es to par­tic­i­pate picks its own start and stop times and the script takes care of all those details.
  • A first two weeks of school devo­tion­al to get stu­dents fired up when they return from sum­mer break
  • Coach­ing emails for peo­ple who are called to min­istry
  • Month­ly emails for Chi Alpha grads to help them make the tran­si­tion out of col­lege grace­ful­ly
  • A ter­m’s worth of week­ly emails for peo­ple pio­neer­ing new Chi Alpha min­istries
  • etc,etc

It’s just a mat­ter of find­ing a per­son with the right exper­tise and hook­ing them up. So if you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear about it. I’d espe­cial­ly love to hear if you’re a Chi Alpha leader who has con­tent ready to go. I can just run it past Den­nis and get that stuff online faster than you can imag­ine. 😉

5 thoughts on “Digital Discipleship”

  1. Glen,

    That’s so cool! I’m glad to see some­one use the idea and prove the con­cept would work. I’ll see how it goes with the one I set up for our church a cou­ple weeks ago.

    Reply

  3. This is a beau­ti­ful­ly effi­cient way to auto­mate infor­ma­tion flow … but some­thing inside me is throw­ing a flag on the field.

    I won­der what we have to be more cau­tious about as a result of increas­ing effi­cien­cy? By stream­lin­ing and pur­chas­ing effort, do we then have an oblig­a­tion to be even more inten­tion­al about re-invest­ing that time/effort into the mun­dan­i­ty of doing life and spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion? I say this because I’m among the guilti­est of those who chase that drag­on. I am haunt­ed by ways I’m falling short in more exis­ten­tial areas, like shar­ing home-cooked meals or sit­ting for long spells and talk­ing, wait­ing for the Spir­it to alight upon us and reveal Truth in a way that does­n’t fit into a ser­vice sched­ule or a small group meet­ing.

    Reply

    1. I’d have a red flag too if this were a replace­ment for life-on-life dis­ci­ple­ship. But as a sup­ple­ment, it’s hard to fault. There’s a long and noble Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion of dis­ci­ple­ship via let­ter writ­ing. For that mat­ter, let­ters com­prise a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of our New Tes­ta­ment. This just takes a clas­sic tool of the church and makes it sim­pler.

      Reply

  4. Glen,

    I’d agree with what you said in response to John’s con­cerns. What you did was auto­mate what Dick Schroed­er was already doing. He man­u­al­ly sent out the same emails to each stu­dent and addressed them to each one my name. This does the same thing for him, gives the same con­tent, but all auto­mat­i­cal­ly. And it still allows peo­ple to inter­act with him through the process, so they have a real per­son to answer ques­tions, not just an autore­spon­der.

    I think it’s good that John is bring­ing this up, because I’m all about Chris­tian­i­ty being organ­ic and rela­tion­al. I don’t think this should ever replace rela­tion­ships or replace every­thing we do to dis­ci­ple peo­ple. That would be wrong.

    But in any area where you’re cur­rent­ly send­ing the same info over and over to the same peo­ple, then this can do that for you in a much more effec­tive way that will actu­al­ly free you up time to do the rela­tion­al things that John men­tions.

    Reply

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