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Summary

In this conversation, Joey Ferrell explores the intersection of technology and evangelism, emphasizing the importance of using modern tools to spread the gospel. He discusses the historical context of technology in biblical times, the lessons learned from past disasters, and the current dynamics of digital outreach. Ferrell highlights the need for churches to adapt to changing methods while maintaining the core message of the gospel. He also addresses the challenges and considerations that come with digital evangelism, ultimately advocating for a balanced approach to utilizing technology in ministry.

Chapters

00:00 The Role of Technology in Evangelism
02:35 Understanding the Importance of Communication
11:05 Lessons from Historical Disasters
14:13 The Biblical Basis for Evangelism
16:51 The Expediency of Technology in Worship
22:44 Exploring Ancient Infrastructure and Modern Navigation
25:08 The Role of Technology in Evangelism
28:16 Understanding Digital Discipleship and Community Engagement
30:20 Navigating the Challenges of Digital Evangelism
32:58 Balancing Online and Local Church Efforts
37:18 The Future of Technology in Evangelism

Transcript *This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.*

Joey Ferrell (00:06)
First thing I wanna do is go a little bit rogue. Brian’s like, boy, here we go. I want you to take your phone out and I’m gonna do something different than anybody else has done. I want you to turn your notifications on for just a moment, okay? Turn your ringer on, it’s okay. I’m giving you the authority to do that. think Brian stepped, no, he’s back there. I was gonna say he stepped out so we could really go with this. But anyhow, turn your notifications on. I want you to do something with me.

I want you to pull up your text messages, okay? And I want you to create a text message. If you don’t know how to do that, there are some younger folks around that will help you with that. But I want you to think of somebody in your contacts that is not here that you know, it could be a loved one, it could be a friend, it could be your preacher.

It could be, if you’re a preacher, could be your elders. But when I tell you what I want you to do, make sure you do this earnestly, okay? And if you don’t have any friends or loved ones or preachers or elders in your contact, I can give you Brian’s number. Okay, you can text him. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to text somebody right now. Tell them you care for them. Tell them you love them. Ask them how you can pray for them. I want you to do that. Just take a minute to do that.

Alright, now I’ve done it myself. I’ve left my ringer off. The reason I told you to put your notifications and ringers on is because I want to hear somebody speak back. I want to hear that, okay?

Because here’s what’s going to happen, especially if it’s somebody that you’ve not talked to in quite some time. An experiment like this was done many years ago at Youth Conference I was at, and a fellow that I didn’t know was there of the 4,000 5,000 people that were there text me. I didn’t even know he had my number. ⁓ And so it was really interesting to hear back from him. Has anybody gotten a reply back yet? All right. So Brian got a reply. So whoever I gave Brian’s number to, thank you.

you gotta reply back that that’s it was important for you to see that and camp and the reason being i saw somebody else not as well the reason being is because we’re going to talk about technology

technology. We’re going to put this into play though and hopefully I will stay in my allotted time because I’m opening for Stephen, there he is, he’s already told me that I better make sure I do it right because he’s behind me. But I want to make sure that we understand the principle behind technology and evangelism. We’re going talk about that greatly today.

And as we do that though, I also want to put this out there. Brian, when he sent me the assignment, one of the very, he sent me three points or whatever that I was supposed to follow. One is show how technology is approved in the Bible.

Somebody tell me where you find a cell phone in the Bible. You don’t, do you? Or a computer or a microphone or a PowerPoint. You don’t. And so we’ve got to hash that out today. You see on the screen a beautiful picture of a sunset and waves.

a wave of opportunity that we have within the church of today. We’re gonna talk about that and see why it matters. Now this other picture, and I don’t know if this is real or AI, is an internet picture of an event that happened December 26, 2004 in the Indian Ocean. was really December 25th, our time, 5.58 p.m. in Colorado, which I guess will be about 7.58 here if I got the time zone right.

Most of us had no idea what was going on. I don’t know if anyone here was affected by that or if you knew people that were affected by it, but you may remember there was a tsunami that happened. Actually didn’t happen at that point in time. What happened was a tremendous earthquake. A 9.1 on the Richter scale earthquake happened.

And when that happened, these few people that were working in this, I don’t know what you would call it, but this dome in Golden, Colorado, in the USGS, the United States Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center, all of a sudden, it’s Christmas for them, right? But they see all these things trickling on their computers. I’ve seen some movies and stuff like that, and I can imagine some guy with a big long beard, hair hadn’t been combed in months, he’s sitting there, and all of a sudden,

this computer lights up and they’re thinking what on earth, can we have happening here? Inside this building nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains they saw this happening, this holiday shift, this skeleton crew, they saw what appeared to be these subtle squiggles and then all of a sudden they started increasing and growing and growing and growing and they didn’t know.

what to do you see the became a very serious situation and and and as that transpired and as it unfolded the the idea was that this was a catastrophe that was growing as time went on now somebody may ask what does this have to do with technology in a banter with

Well, you know, really and truly, does answer the question, but the answer is not within just the spectrum of what I’ve told you already in this article that we’ve looked at, but what I am going to tell you that they will unfold in the next hours that were to come.

they soon would realize the ultimate tragedy ahead of the night. The tsunami waves were already raging across the oceans and the rivers and the ⁓ areas that it would impact at jet plane speeds. You know, we’re not talking about it at 10 mile per hour or anything. We’re talking very quickly. They had nothing they could do in their own…

idea of where they were at. So they were reaching into their ideas and their minds and they reaching out to all these contacts that they had trying to warn everybody. It was said that there was no comprehensive warning system in the Indian Ocean that could disseminate warnings to the public. I want you to think about that. That’s just 20, you know, 22 years ago. Almost, it’s not even 22, 23, little over 23 years ago that these things happened. Not even 21 years ago, rather.

But they would soon realize the tragedy that was ahead of them. The tragedy that would come. The team knew that every minute mattered. Every single second mattered. But what could they do in a time in which they had no way to alert people? As the night went on, they said it would be one of the deadliest disasters in recorded history.

as they worked through the night, they looked at these things, they started to get reports back in from different areas. Well, here’s the result. You see what’s happening. Over 235,000 lives were recorded lost in this scenario. I don’t know that we understand that. You know what it’s like to lose a friend or a family member or a church member. And you know how hard and how sad that can be, right?

We know even in our own country if you were alive during September 11, 2001, you know what it was like for us to see 3,000 souls lost. Isn’t that ironic that we read about 3,000 souls saved or about, as Ryan mentioned the other day? But we also witnessed, some of us, most of us witnessed the day where 3,000 souls were lost.

I don’t know about their eternal salvation, but we know that their lives were lost that day. And here we have the same thing happening in magnitudes and magnitudes beyond what we know what to do with. These scientists, they didn’t know what to do. They had no way to tell the people. They had no method of letting them know that this earthquake had measured larger than anything they had ever seen and that the ramifications of that were still yet to come.

But they did what they could. They did everything they could, but entire communities vanished. Villages that had been around for hundreds of years gone. Some of those places maybe still have not recovered at all, even if they will ever recover. We’ve seen that happen in history’s time, but nothing that deadly, that devastating has ever happened in my lifetime until this point.

And I hope I don’t see anything like that ever in my lifetime again.

More importantly though, we have to think about the idea of were those just lives that were lost? Well, when you think about that, mean, when we think about the idea of a life being lost, there’s more to it, isn’t there? There’s much more to it. What about their souls? I don’t know the salvation of those souls.

But I do know this, that the fate of an even greater number of people were lost that very day that may not have ever heard the soul saving message of Jesus. Whose fault is it? Was it those scientists?

Was it God’s? mean, some people will say, well, God let it happen, you know? No, I mean, things, we know that. We understand the nature of God. We understand the nature of things that happen. And we comprehend that as Christians, we know that there is, there’s good and bad, there’s evil and right. And yes, there’s gonna be things like that happen. But what if they could have known?

What if those souls could have known that these gigantic waves were coming? Maybe some of them looked out and said, what’s that? Because this is early morning in their timeline. Maybe somebody got up and walked out to go on their morning walk. I mean, there could have been tourists there in the area that were their cup of coffee. Honey, what on earth is that? And then we never hear from them.

What if they could have known? You see, the very first lesson that we had earlier in the week, Zach, was here, and I thought, what is he doing with that fire extinguisher? Right, and if you were here, you understand what I’m talking about. He had a fire extinguisher sitting up here, and he was sitting over here in the corner, and man, gonna, you know, talking about preaching some hell and hellfire and brimstone, right? But he used that as an example, you know, of saving lives.

Technology can save lives as well. What do mean by that?

Well, you’ve got a few guys in the room I’ve already talked to this morning that they do technology work in their churches, okay? give them credit, where credit is due. They’re doing things to help people, okay? But we’re gonna look at that. I don’t wanna spend too much time there, because I wanna get back into some examples of how we can use technology, but we’ve gotta build this up. You see, what we were talking about so far was the emergent of technology. We’re talking about those things that ⁓ we know have happened, but let’s think

in a biblical stance. know Ezekiel, and it’s been mentioned many times this week, Ezekiel chapter 3 and 33, Ezekiel was called the watchman. God called him to that purpose. I want you to listen to a couple of verses in Ezekiel. It starts around verse number 16, but the element would be in verse number 18. When I say to the wicked, you shall surely die, and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way to save his life. That same wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his

I will require at your hand.” Boy, that’s a strong warning, isn’t it? Yet if you warn the wicked and he does not turn from his wickedness nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity, but you have delivered your soul. Friends, if you don’t read that and understand the task that is at hand for us, you’ve missed the entire point of the passage.

Yes, this was given to Ezekiel in a particular time for a particular situation, but can we not see that that is also given to the church of today? Matthew 28, 18 through 20. We’ll get into some of those verses a little bit later, but we’ve been commanded, as Brother BJ and Brother Jimmy talked about, you know, those commissions that were given in Matthew and Mark, as we talk about those things, those commissions were given to us as well, church, and we’ve got to understand that.

You know, we’ve got to ask some questions. How did the Jews know what God wanted? Well, He told them, right? But in this instance, when we’ve got Ezekiel here, the watchman, Ezekiel’s job was to make sure they understood. They understood what was right, what was wrong, and they had the command given unto them. How did the Gentiles later on know what God wanted of them?

We have to ask that question. Somebody had to tell them, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s something that just comes when we’re naturally born, they had to be told. How would the Jews and Gentiles both understand Romans 1-16, the power of salvation unto God? How would they understand that in that time, thousands, you know, maybe hundreds and thousands of years later after the time it was given? How do you and I know what God’s plan is that we might be saved?

How do we know what our task and our responsibility is here on this earth? How do we know these things? Well, you know, when we think about the answer, you’ve seen it on the screen all week long. Every single day we’ve seen it come up on the screen. The simple answer is evangelism.

It’s a word that we don’t find in any single translation of the Bible. The word has been defined. I got to cut out about two paragraphs of my manuscript because everybody else has defined it. Thank you, all your speakers. I’m not even gonna try to pronounce the words. But we understand that those ideas come from scripture. It is the heralding of the truth. It is the idea. mean, Paul declared it in Romans 10, 14 and 15, how then shall they call on him in whom they’ve not believed?

and how shall they believe in him who they’ve not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? Now, if you’re not a preacher, hold on, we’re gonna get to you too, okay? Because we’ve got to understand it is the command for everyone. And in this lesson, the dynamics of technology in evangelism are gonna be tested, not in the first century context as was given to me, find it in the Bible, but we’re gonna test it in the 21st century, okay?

I mean think about that, we’re now into the heart of that century. You know, we’re moving forward very quickly into that. And so the dynamics of evangelism are gonna be tested there. The reality is that evangelism as well as preaching the word has continued to change drastically over time. Now don’t get me wrong, we do not change what we preach. We preach the truth. But the dynamics,

The idea of how we preach it, how we teach it has changed significantly. want you to think about the times in which we can read about where Jesus stands in the praetoriums, he stands in the open vestibules and preaches to the crowd. We don’t see that today, right? Maybe we should.

You know, maybe we should be seeing those things, but we’ve seen these things change. The methodology changes. It will continue to change well beyond our lifetime unless the Lord returns. We can understand that. We can understand that. I don’t know how many years ago you put this screen in, Brian, here at the South Florida Avenue Church. I don’t know how many years ago you started using a microphone. I mean, I don’t know.

But it’s changed, it’s changed in your congregation, whether you’re here or somewhere else. But it’s the responsibility of the church to always proclaim that the message being preached remains the same. First Corinthians chapter one, Romans 10, and Galatians one. We need to understand that idea. So as we’ve seen the emergence of technology, let’s talk about a couple of elements of that. The first one is the expedient of technology.

You see, when looking at the idea of is it biblical, that’s where we’ve got to go. We know that. We know that we have some of our religious friends who would like to argue sometimes, well, you know, I can have a band up here because that makes us feel good, right? That’s not an expedient. That changes worship. An expedient does not change things.

An expedient allows us to take ease in things, so to speak. It never changes the idea of worship. There is a biblical precedent though for technology and evangelism. I did kind of find it. You’re gonna have to stay with me though. Because when we think about that, the charge of the command of Matthew 28, 18 through 20, Mark 16, 15, 16, what method is the most successful? You’ve got your own. That’s been said this week too.

You may use, I mean I like the Back to the Bible series. Before I started using that, you know what my method of Bible study was? You ain’t gonna believe this. A blank piece of paper with a line down the middle. And basically truth and error. And as I would sit down with somebody, we would start in the book of John. You shall know the truth and truth shall set you free. And then we would go either backwards or forwards and we would stay in the book of John for about 30 minutes.

and we would just write down, okay, well this is what John said, do you claim that as truth or do you claim that as error? And by the time we would get done with that Bible study, we would have so much stuff on the side of truth and I would have nothing on the side of error. And if they had something on error, they had to figure out why it was there. And so that was my method. Now I’ve found since then, different methods work different ways. The open Bible study. I mean, for many years, people have used it and it works.

the jill miller film strips i’ll be honestly i’ve never watched the jill miller film strip but i know its value i know that it has saved many people’s souls through the work and effort that they used to create that and the people that took it out among others it’s not an easy answer to find the best method as somebody said here the other night i think it was lance said said ⁓ you’re waiting for the the secret i don’t have it yes i do

It’s right here. It’s the gospel. If we preach it, they will come. I mean, we’ve got to understand that.

1st Corinthians 10 and verse number 23 talks about those expedients that we can have. said, all things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but not all things addify. You see, there’s gonna be some things that we may do in technology that just don’t make sense. And we’re gonna see that too. But there are gonna be some things that will really, really start to make you think, oh, why aren’t we doing this? Or can I do this differently? Will this make my job as a minister or an elder or a church member?

evangelist, don’t forget an evangelist is not always just the preacher, is it not going to make my job easier? And I hope that’s what we’re going to see today and we’re going to see that through some examples. I want you to think about some very interesting examples of expediency for technology in the Bible.

I know you don’t think you know where it’s going yet, but we’re gonna talk about it, Noah. He’s not the first person in technology in the Bible though, all right? But we’re gonna take a jump off point with Noah. I don’t think anybody here would disagree that God told Noah exactly what he wanted him to do, right? He told him he wanted to build an ark, he told him how big he wanted it, he told him what to make it with, right? Did he tell him how to cut the wood? No.

Did he tell him what to use to put the wood together? Well, he did at some point. Yeah, I got a yes and no, and you’re both right. You know, he did tell him what to use to put some up together. But if anybody’s ever worked in crafting anything, a hammer’s a pretty neat tool, isn’t it? You know, it’s good at banging your fingernails if nothing else, right? But do you think Noah ran down to the local ace hardware store and grabbed a hammer?

I mean, he had to figure out what to use, right? Did God tell him what to use? Not that we have recorded, but he had to use something, right? He had to use some kind of technology to put that boat together. He had to use some kind of technology to know how to get the wood from a tree to the side of the boat. And if he had not used the plan and the method and the ideology that God gave him, would that boat have floated? No.

But yet we don’t see every single item, every single word revealed. How about, and this is two thoughts into one, you John said to Gaius in 3 John 13, I have many more things to write to you, but I did not want to do it with what? Pen and ink. Now, we have the written Bible today because of technology, do we not?

That didn’t start with the Gutenberg press even though we’ll talk about that a little bit later. It started with things like what John said there in 3 John and verse number 13, right? He wrote it with what? Pen and ink. Well, I never saw a pen in Genesis, did you? So somewhere along the line, technology changed. That’s a long timeframe from Genesis to 3 John, but somewhere along the line, technology was there.

Can you think about it? Brother BJ walked in here last night, had two Bibles in his hand, I thought, oh boy, we ain’t leaving here for a while. I mean, he had a small Bible, a big Bible. And what if I’d walked in here this morning with some tablets of stone? And I’m gonna read to you from 3 John, right? mean, technology is our friend. It’s not an enemy. I heard it said once at lectureship many years ago that if we use technology long enough, it’s time for the church to use it, okay?

What about the Roman roads and shipping routes for travel? I’ve never been to Rome. Some of you have. Some of you have been to those areas where the Bible lands are. Do some of those roads still exist? Yeah.

I’ve seen pictures. They’re there. Some of the buildings are even still there in part. I mean, not really all of it, but those shipping routes for travel, I would get so lost on the body of water. I’ve learned, know, all right, so I’m a new transplant to Florida, two weeks, but I’ve lived in Tennessee all my life. Tennessee, we don’t give directions like you give in Florida.

We say you go down to the old store and you turn left. I don’t know if that’s east, west, north, or south. I have no idea. But somebody in Florida’s gonna tell me where you go west for about 10 miles. I’m looking like there’s no sun out. How have I figured that out? Where’s the west at? And then I drove down here from the Panhandle the other day on the scenic route on 98. Did y’all know 98 goes in all four directions? That ain’t right.

That’s not right. mean, if I’m going east on 98, I should not be driving south. I mean, it just don’t work. And at one point I’m going east and my compass is showing west. I don’t know. But those Roman roads, those shipping routes, those things that were there, the technology that our forefathers, the apostles, the disciples were able to use, what about the buildings and houses and venues to meet in the church? We’ve got a beautiful building here to meet me and it’s comfortable.

But you know what, they also had buildings to meet him in the time of the first century church. How’d they get there? I mean, you think they, you know, the Big Bang Theory, they just automatically appeared? No, somebody built them. How’d they build them? Technology. And so we need to understand that, that we have technology at our disposal.

I want you to think about in Acts chapter 1 verse number 8, but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. When you think about that, I mean we struggle. It was said last night, I think 8.1 billion people now in the world.

How do we reach everybody? How do we get across the earth and reach these people to let them know about this soul saving message of Jesus? How do we do that?

Friends, we’re gonna talk about that, but we need to understand that they did it, okay? In Acts chapter two, one through 47, we find it unfolding. We see that they’re gonna preach. We’re gonna see that they’re gonna set out on foot and by boat and by other means to go out and to reach people with the gospel. And if the apostles and the followers of Jesus could do it in a world that was without our advanced technology, we cannot have excuses to say, oh, I just can’t do it.

I mean it’s just, and that’s what it is, it’s an excuse. mean, you think about that, you know, using that shipping example, the area we moved to a couple years ago opened a ship building yard. I have seen in the past two years them build from the ground up two Staten Island ferries.

Now I don’t know how you get a Staten Island ferry from the Panhandle of Florida up to Staten Island, but they’ve built and launched two of those things. They’re working on two Coast Guard cutters right now. If you drive to the area where we live, you’ll see them, think, what in the world is that thing? But they’re working on, they’ll get those things built. It took Noah how long? We don’t really know, but I mean, the scripture kinda acts like it’s about 100 years. And so when we think about that, we understand technology changes things and it’s even amazing to consider how much

better we can do that. Now you remember those text messages you sent out? Hopefully some of you have gotten responses by now. But Brian, it took him about 18 seconds to get a response, right? Somewhere around in there? 25 seconds? 30 seconds? Okay. What’s important is I don’t know who you text.

i take somebody that’s probably on the airplane this morning so i don’t know that they got my text but at the same time we will get an answer back and we’ll get back a whole lot quicker than than ⁓ than than we can driver or fly or anything else so as we talk about that we have to understand there isn’t a value or an estimation to technology

There’s an inherent value to it and we’ve got to look at that. With this in mind, research has shown that technology has a very vital and growing role in evangelism. Whether some technology actually improves or detracts is another topic in itself. I hope you’re listening church. There are things in technology that will help the church. There are things in technology that will hurt the church. They can be the same thing too. We’ve to be very careful with that.

clement said ⁓ in the study it’s in the the manuscript in two thousand nineteen that some of the most popular questions on search engines helpless to find souls where they are and these are interesting with my work with the gospel of christ i do this every year ago i try to find the most ask religious questions google that’s the most popular search engine here they are is god real what happens when we got how do i know i’m safe why is there so much suffering

in the world. That was in 2019 that that survey came across. You know what’s repetitive every year? These same questions usually pop up at the beginning of the year, every single year as being the most asked questions from the year before. It doesn’t change. So technology helps us to allow us to know what people are thinking, but also noted in this same survey, 77 % of Americans are on social media. This is 2019.

I’ll share some numbers with you a little bit later if time allows to show you how much that has changed. But I also need to understand that another study a little over two decades ago, that’s 20 years if you’re not thinking.

Digital discipleship and evangelism are ways to activate the social influence of a church membership, building bridges to the local community, developing a meaningful understanding of felt needs, and determining relevant ways to serve the community, both in and outside the church. It’s also a strategy to scale up friendship, evangelism, and empower individuals to be actively involved in the larger goals and mission of your church. However,

Millennials can spend up to 18 hours a day consuming media in the form of movies, podcasts, social media, video games, reading, and more. That’s 20 plus years ago that this came up. My clock isn’t saying five minutes yet. It’s funny because I did put the clock up here, but what’s interesting is every time I hit a slide it starts over, so I’ve still got 38 minutes.

technology is working better than yours, Some platforms do show success, but the time spent using technology continues to grow. Did you hear what I 18 hours a day? That’s the millennial generation. They quit blaming everything on the millennials, y’all. Okay, if you’re in here, I heard one. Quit blaming everything on them, especially the decline in the church, because you know what? I’ve seen some surveys that show there are more millennials in the church than there are the baby boomers now. Okay, be careful.

We’ve got two more generations behind those millennials now. So we need to think about that as well. Some of these things are very evident. There’s more social networks growing every single day. And AI is becoming a standard in a lot of digital reach. We might not like it, but it’s there. And it’s there to stay.

Okay, we’ve got to be careful with that. So technology has an expense as well, Plugging in has its challenges. Digital evangelism, using technology to spread the message of faith has become increasingly prevalent today. While some see it as a valuable tool for reaching a wider audience, others view it as a dilution of traditional religious practices. That was from an article in 2023. ⁓ Still holds true. But he made several points on that. And so church, if you’re gonna plug in, realize you’re gonna

have some problems, okay? You’re going to have some challenges there. What are they? There are some negatives and we must be wise in our efforts. We must realize that we just don’t belong in some places, okay? In technology. There are instant content out there that we can figure out real quickly is not reliable content, right? And we need to make sure we understand that.

artificial intelligence it can deceive because it grows from a user database saw a picture the other day it was supposed to be a picture from nineteen forties in the main street and it looked real it looked really real and somebody said i don’t remember that sign being there you know an older person said i don’t remember seeing that sign there in the fifties and sixties well when you look at the sign the letters were backwards and crooked and guess what that’s AI okay and so we’ve got to be very careful with what we’re looking at

Also, we need to understand that balance can be overthrown quickly. and I’m talking about balance on what we’re looking at as far as scriptural balance versus non-scriptural. You know, the ideas of the world versus the ideas of church, but also preachers listen to me. Balance is also needed between local work and online efforts. Now, if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, I want to say this gingerly. We have a lot of podcasts out there, okay, and that’s good.

It’s reaching people. But if all I’m doing is sitting in my office all day long creating new podcasts or new videos or new this or new that, I’m not reaching someone in local community. We need to be very, very careful about that balance. The elephant in room. Virtual or online worship as it’s called sometimes can become a Jeroboam situation.

I owned a technology company for 25 plus years. I installed live streaming before COVID, okay? It has a purpose. It has a very good purpose. I could make suggestions and there again, don’t throw the tomatoes at me yet, but I can make suggestions. One of those suggestions is maybe you don’t do your live stream during the middle of your worship service, okay? Extend it out a little ways. That way the people that really can benefit from the live stream service.

can benefit from it while some who have made a decision to stay home because maybe it’s too cold or maybe snow’s coming later on next week.

But we need to understand it’s a good tool if it’s used effectively. But if it becomes a replacement for worship, no. It cannot. It cannot be a 1 Kings chapter 12 situation. You know, many people have benefited from that, but we need to be careful with that. Let me run through some examples with you real quick. Good technology can help with evangelism. Websites. There are some thorns in my flesh on technology. One of those is websites.

If your church has a website, please go look at it. If you’re in leadership in your congregation, please go look at it again. You know how many churches are out there that have websites that they do not have an address, do not have a phone number, do not have meeting times. They have a contact form you click on that comes back with an error. mean, folks, the idea is that this is our new Yellow Pages.

This is how people find the church. on the other perspective of that, if your church has a website, it does not need 47 buttons across the top. It needs to be, and if you don’t know how to build a website, there are good people in the church that will help you. Some of them are paid people, some of them are free people. Here’s what I’ll tell you, if you’re starting a website at your church, do not just let one person manage that website.

If it’s the preacher, guess what? A couple years from now, he may be preaching down the road somewhere, if he’s still preaching at all. And if he’s the one with the key to the website and nobody else has a key, guess what happens?

Right? You know what I’m saying, right? You’ve seen it. Social media overall. ⁓ Lord Willen later on today, Paul Mays is gonna talk in depth about TikTok and how it’s been successful for him. But we need to think about social media in our efforts. But what we need to understand is there’s a time and a place. I heard somebody say it earlier this week. It’s not for the 47 comment argument. Okay? And I’m guilty of that. It is for getting contacts.

I’m in several groups back in Tennessee, of course I don’t live in Tennessee now, but I’m in several groups in Tennessee that it does not go a single day where somebody asks, and these are community groups, somebody says, hey, I’m looking for a new church. Oh boy. Well then the comments, you know, they go crazy. So with that being said, get in those groups.

but handle them differently. Don’t just comment, hey, here’s my church, you need to come here, it’s the best, it’s the right one, it’s this, that, and the other. No, set up a group of people you know in the area, because you know what I found mostly in these groups? ⁓ James and Kelly will understand this one. Manchester, Tennessee, it was mostly women asking. Well, I’m not comfortable sending a woman a private message on Facebook that I’ve never met before to tell her about our congregation, right? But Kelly might be.

So if I’ve got a group of people in different areas in the communities that I can reach out to and connect them, boy, that’s great. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, the real videos, they are very successful, very popular. I said I’d share some numbers with you. There are over three billion people on Facebook now. That’s almost half of the population. 2.1 billion people log in every day. That’s unreal. That’s bigger than some countries, right?

And so we need to understand that. It is a tool, but we need to keep in mind technology changes daily. In 2025, Facebook changed something that messed up your Facebook pages for your church. If you were live streaming and you’re only live streaming on your Facebook page, you now have a dead Facebook page, period. What do mean by that? Well, they did away with storing live videos for over a month. So what happens now?

somebody’s scrolling the system last week the seat next week the seat the next week there’s a post from two thousand twelve i don’t know about your but i don’t want to go to a dead church is that not a dead church that’s representation of it is not methods change adaptation is necessary without example radio television on all closing what we got negative minute ⁓

Alright, I’ll finish this out real quickly. Radio and television, excellent opportunity, but it does take effort. I work with a nationwide television program. We had to revamp our studios about two years ago to the tune of about $20,000. We reach over 200,000 households every single week. are statistically the second most watched program within the churches of Christ across the country.

I asked Ben Bailey last night, when did we first launch on TV? Because the program’s 30 years old this month, or this year, in June. But we didn’t launch on television until 2003. Since 2003, it’s taken that long to grow into that many viewers. I met somebody a while back last year in a preaching school. I won’t say where, it doesn’t matter.

But he came up and he said, that’s what I’m gonna do when I graduate preaching school. I don’t mean to bust your bubble.

but he got twenty years to make it work. I mean that’s what it’s going to take. I’m not saying you can’t successfully create a television program, whatever the case may be, but it’s the same idea. You need to understand there are expenses in that. There’s podcasts, there’s apps, there’s blogs. Where do we go from here? In conclusion, technology has been utilized seemingly since the beginning of time. Mine still says thirty-eight minutes, Brian. Every time I click it’s like…

had to tend the garden, had to build the ark, we go on and go on. We see that Isaiah became a blacksmith. mean, there’s technology everywhere. Jesus commanded that the gospel be preached to all the world. That’s the important thing. And friends, we need to use every Bible method that we can. The Bible clearly states that the message is to be spread, and technology is one of the ways that we can do that. Thank you for your time this afternoon. Have a good morning.