I’m sitting at something of a crossroads when it comes to tech and ministry. At times, when looking at what many of us who speak online about it want, its comes across more like we are defending our stances, rather than showing folks how to design a faith that’s theirs. I don’t know even if I can point to specific examples, but, it just seems that way.

As I worked on a different paradigm of presenting the Mobile Ministry Methodology, I was challenged with this perspective. Here, I’m being asked to take something that’s been in my head and on these (uh) pages, and then translate it into something that would effectively transfer knowledge and change how the outputs of ministry projects are processed by all. You see, I could have done this the way previous MMM talks have gone – a mobile-driven, HTML-produced slideshow, with a story or three to knit what’s on the screen with the lesson meant to be learned. And that would work; but the challenge hasn’t been translating the information, its been changing the behavior. Outside of pulling an Elijah on some social network’s digital mountain, there’s not much we can do to change behavior… or is there?

A brother in the faith that I recently met teaches and speaks on the subject of apologetics. He and I have had several snippet conversations and we’ve had a general fun time in getting to know each other around this topic. Here’s the thing: we come to points of these conversations where we get from asking how people can or won’t defend values present in the Christian faith, to wondering what we individually, professionally, and vocationally, can do to empower others to think differently, and therefore shift their response to life and change their behaviors. I tell you, those discussions are always a caffene shot to the day.

So, I get this chance to share strategy and process, and what do I do? I design a flow to ignite design-centric thinking – not defend traditional means of going through a process, or collecting information, or even just presenting it. Will it be successful? I’m not sure. The proof in the pudding is whether the output of the product is reproducable, not simply something worth being defended.