If you are visiting MMM, chances are that you’ve already identified the opportinuity that mobile can and does play within life around you. You might even have realized that there’s an inroad within your ministry or organization that can be better developed within the lens of mobile processes or actions. Just having a realization isn’t enough, and many time, what’s signifiant about an opportnunity to utilize a new tool isn’t the possibilities with it, but the tangeable results afterwards.

As any person who has done process design or even some kind of system/process analysis will tell you, opportunities are best defined by being able to track progress and replicate the successes. In the context of mobile ministry, this is no different – however, identifying the real opportunity from the pie-in-the-sky ones does present a problem. Here are some of the questions MMM has posed to groups in the past:

• How many people will be needed to setup and support the technology and administrative efforts?
• What are the reasonable levels of participation compared to the histories of other activities?
• What are the costs you see/don’t see?
• What event could drastically change the outcome of this effort (positively or negatively)?
• What are the social implications of this effort? Is there a point of no return?

Questions such as these can be asked before making a step forward in order to better understand the scope of the proposed opportunity. Once these questions are addressed, the idea of what’s a clear opportunity and what isn’t not only becomes clear, but then moving forward towards ministry that’s enabled my mobility becomes something less likely to meet the kinds of resistances which should have been considered beforehand.

What you can’t do is be afraid to take a chance. Innovation demands that you put down the teathers of success or failure and embrace adventure at the cost of engaging others within this faith journey. Yes, some efforts will cost more (people, resources, financally, etc.) than others; and clearly, there are some things that depending on the context that you just should not do; but there is never a reason to not try something new. Mobile is too new of a context for a group not to.

Identifying an opportunity for mobile-enabled minsitry should not be looked at as a means to boost numbers for anything except the household of faith. We should not be looking at creating a new digital community, or another layer to people interacting within [our] faith communities without first looking to address areas of need – personal, communial, social, legal, etc. – that enable the fruit of the “good news” (John 13:34-35) to be seen, consumed, and multiplied (Matthew 28:18-20).

Then, the results of our excursions into mobile would be seen and received with gladness (or even greater tribulation, which is also a sign of vindication), and the risen Christ is rightly credited with taking opportunity of the moment, and we are thanked for being in position to be utilized as vessels for His moment (Zechariah 14:20-21).