Mobile Ministry Magazine

I embarked on a bit of communication cleansing this week. In the early part of the week, I answered some questions relating to ministry activities. Then some items at work had be both flustered and prayerful. And then the (near) big thing; I made a call to eliminate email from my life.

Now let me say this. Its almost impossible to do so due to MMM, Brighthand, and work responsibilities. However, personally, I can do this, and it would be hard, but possible. So I set about forwarding various personal email addresses to my mobile phone number's email address. Every mobile phone number is an email address, and messages sent to it would become SMS (text) messages.

I then set up some autoresponders for those email addresses letting people know that its best from this point out to contact me via SMS and/or IM. And because I'm stingy with both SMS and IM, I know (based on relationship to me) whom will contact me how.

So I made this change and you know the first thing I noticed? I get way too much email that I don't read. I'm speaking of newsletters and such. I just don't read them. And getting these extremely long messages as SMSes didn't help one bit to make me read them. So I've set about unsubscribing from them all.

Of course, not everything was that simple. I needed to also change the email addresses for those entities that I like to the mobile email/SMS address. That was harder than I thought it would be because I needed to click on links to verify the change, but the links were usually broken. So I had to type (copy) the link down in Notepad and then click on it in another web browser so that I could make that change. Thankfully, that only had to be done twice.

Lastly, its responding to people. Already I've had some people message me asking what is the correct email address because a SMS is too small; I simply responded that if it can't be said in 160 characters, then you probably are saying too much, or should call/visit to discuss it.

Sounds harsh, but there's a point I'm trying to make with this. We have all noticed that (certain types of) tech has gotten to the point where its ruling our lives. Where we are bending-over-backwards-and-above to see who is contacting us when, and a lot of times the messages can wait or be better prioritized. Because SMS is about as pervasive as messaging gets and not web-based, I ensure that I get the message, but the response time is still up to me. If you will, I'm changing my behavior to address the content/context, not the will of the technology.

Given this story, I'd like to encourage you to think about your use of technology. It may very well be that you need certain types of interactions for your life/work. However, if you are letting the Facebooks, tweets, emails, SMSes, IMs, and voice calls rule you, then you are no more than one of Pavlov's dogs, simply responding to a bell, rather than using your will to delegate the importance of the communication. Find better filters; then change your response to messages with them. You have only so-large of a bucket of things you can take in (directly and indirectly).

To those messaging you, they too should respect context. Not everything needs to be said in three pages (like this post), and many things need more than 160 characters. Find a balance, and then clearly communicate which methods are best for them to best reach you. You might not get rid of all the junk that comes your way, but the reduction in stress will allow you to better serve Christ and others with the tech you've resigned yourself to use.

Labels: communication, community, SMS, tech