 Okay, the calling is on. Good morning. Welcome everybody to 314, a course of Media and Technology and Ministry. Let's pray and get started. Could somebody please pray with us and we'll get started. Anybody? Siddhant, why don't you pray? Please. Thank you. Father, in the name of Jesus, we thank you for everything, Lord. Thank you for this time, for this class. Lord, help us to understand and receive the things which you have kept us. Lord, let your spirit of wisdom walk in us. Thank you for everything. In Jesus' name, Lord. Amen. Thank you. Alright, so we, in the last couple of lectures, we talked a little bit about print media. We talked about radio, television, and films. Just looking at, you know, all of these different ways and forms of communication, mass communication, and how we could reach people or influence people that thinking through leveraging these channels of mass communication. Just in passing, I want to mention entertainment and gaming. I was going to mention that just to keep that in front of our minds. And then we'll move into what I want to really look into going forward is the place that the internet has in the things we do for ministry. So, when you're talking about entertainment, I don't know what, you know, what your thoughts are. And I'll try to put all these few points and notes and give the PDFs out. But the fact is, you know, as people, as, yes, we are Christians. We are believers. But we also like to have some forms of recreation. Let's just do some fun things. And, you know, all of us will have different forms of recreation. Maybe you like to go out for a meal. Maybe you like to, you know, watch a good movie or just whatever. Different people have different forms of recreation. And entertainment then has its place there to provide a form or a means of recreation. So this is my personal opinion. I don't know how you would look at it. So I don't think it's wrong for believers, Christians, to have entertainment as one of their forms of relaxing and recreation. What do you think? Is it okay? It's not okay? It's okay, sir. Okay. All right. Pastor, it's okay. Depending on the context, you choose to relax in. As a Christian, you cannot entertain yourself with secular music or with anything that is worldly. There can be Christian entertainment where the thing that is involved is not secular. So it is okay, but the context should be mindful of the context. Thank you. That's right. Good. Good. Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. No. Yeah. Say, go ahead. Yes. I believe there's nothing wrong with entertaining ourselves. The Bible says that there is peace, joy, righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Ghost. That's the kingdom of God. And if our entertainment is a product of the joy of the Lord and not just basically to gratify the flesh, I see nothing absolutely wrong with that. As long as the intention is primarily and foundationally to point many to Jesus, to point people to the person of Christ, his character and his ways, to show people the kingdom. If that is the basis and our intent and goal at the end of the day, at the end of every type of entertainment, whether it's even you just coming out to talk on a joke or just a playlet or any form of entertainment, as long as that goal and purpose is there, there's nothing wrong with entertaining ourselves. For the moment it's gratifying the flesh, the moment it's pointing others to ourselves, to exalt ourselves, or it's trying to even deviate people from the part of righteousness, then there is something wrong with that type of entertainment. That does not spring from the Lord. Everything should be intentionally pointing to Jesus from the basis of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that gives us joy. Thank you. Good. Thank you. I think we could agree that as long as entertainment is godly, it's clean, it's righteous, pointing to the Lord, God glorifying, there's nothing wrong. We do need to relax. We need to do some fun things and glorifying God. So what I wanted to get to is, there is this whole space of entertainment, which we as people, meaning God's people, can, of course, we engage in it for ourselves, meaning we find it as a form of recreation, but it can also become a means for us to connect with people from outside. We can invite people, come and see, come and enjoy. Something that's clean, something that's godly, something that's pure, and we can become a touch point for people. From there they can experience Jesus Christ. So there are many different expressions of this. I think some of you touched on it. We could have a comedy show, a clean comedy show, making jokes, but it's clean. It's nothing vulgar, nothing indecent. You can have comedy as a form of entertainment and so on. I just want to point us to one or two things. I'm not spending too much time on this, but there is this whole idea, especially in the United States, and there is some replica of it happening in India. There may be things in other parts of the world. I'm not very sure. But this idea of teen parks, where you can come and just have a very relaxing time, but it's also a very engaging, meaningful time. So can you all see my screen? I'm just sharing the whole screen here. Can you see this? Yes. Okay. So I'm just pointing us to one or two things. So in the United States, there's this one called the Ark Encounter, and you can go to their website if you want to know, and you can watch their videos and all of that. But again, some Christian ministry has, they have created a replica, an actual size replica of Noah's Ark, and it's like an experience that you go in, and it's almost like taking you back to, how would all of this have happened? How would all of this have unfolded? And you can have some videos and all that you can watch here. What is it about the Ark? You can watch these videos and see. So it's a fun thing. But in the process, they're reaffirming biblical truths to us. So you can probably spend a day or two just going around the place and looking at it and learning. Well, this is how it would have actually happened. I'll give you a tour of the Ark and how it most likely would have been built and so on. So this is one kind of interesting thing that people are doing. Similarly, there is a museum called Creation Museum, where they again reaffirm the fact that, you find all these things, but all these things are pointing us to create a God. And they reaffirm the truths of the Bible and so on. So here's another museum where the things of the Bible are affirmed in this theme park. So just pointing us that something like things like this, where these are very, very engaging, and yet there is meaning. And you can go with the family, spend a day out as a part of recreation and so on, but yet there's these beautiful things happening. And just pointing us to the believers who are engaging in various ways and because people do spend time to relax and people do spend time in entertainment, that is a space that the church can tap into very meaningfully and provide something for the church and even for the world to come and see and experience and in the process, hopefully they will encounter God and at least be made to ask the right questions to learn about the true and living God. So just mentioning that in passing, I see a question here from Christopher. Can believers listen to secular music where the content is not ungodly? Yeah, I'm just giving you my opinion and we could discuss this. As long as the content is not ungodly, it's not provoking us to do wrong things, evil things, but it's an example. There's a lot of classical music that is not necessarily from a Christian producer, Christian musician or composer, but the music itself is rich and I don't see anything wrong in it. I personally don't spend a lot of time listening, I don't see anything wrong with that. It's almost like education, right? We all, you know, we go to school. Well, our teachers are not Christians. If you go to a general school, I mean, yeah, some people go to Christian school, that's different, but when you go to a general school, you go to school and college, the teachers are teaching us whatever subjects they're not believers. And so much of our lifetime in schools and colleges, getting education, being taught by people who are not believers, we don't disregard that. No, that's part of our life journey. So, you know, in a similar way, and of course we filter things out in the sense that if there's anything that's contradicting to God or then we challenge that, but it's in a similar way in comes to music, you're not disregarding everything just because it doesn't have Christian content in it. We are careful. If it's ungodly, explicitly ungodly, pushing us away from God or into unrighteousness, we avoid that. But if it's otherwise clean, there's nothing wrong in that. So the next thing that I just want to quickly mention is about gaming, which again in the recent decades has become something that has caught the attention, especially of the younger generation. And nowadays people have games on their phones and so on. What I want us to think about is that gaming, of course there is the wrong side of it, where there are games that are violent or explicitly evil. Of course we need to avoid that. But gaming itself can be used and is being used, I should say, is being used for education. So that means this whole, the word gaming sometimes can be very misleading, but actually it is basically a very engaging interaction with media, whether it's on a computer or on your phone. And if it is being used for education, it's media being used for developing certain skills. So you can find that gaming is used to train medical professionals. So the whole gaming software has been so designed that surgeons are walked, or surgeons, or different medical practitioners, different specialties. The physician is walked through scenarios that almost look real life and then they have, they can diagnose, they can perform surgeries, they can do various things, but really it's a gaming engagement. And it is developing there, them in that particular field. Similarly, gaming and simulation can be used to train pilots or astronauts for different industries. So what I just want to again put before us is that this whole gaming space can be leveraged for very good causes, very good purposes, either to, you know, it could be a simple Bible quiz, just to engage your mind about the Bible, or it could be a game that creates real life scenarios where you are forced to apply the Bible while you're engaging with that digital content, right? And it's engaging because it involves your mind, your sound, your visual, and then your hot process, your cognitive abilities to think through it. Like you need to know the Bible and you need to apply it to a real life, a situation that's presented to you as you engage with that media. So I think this is a space where God's people, I'm saying believers, we can do a lot more to create some really challenging, meaningful content. Now, there are already, you know, there are already people who've created, you know, various Christian-based games like, you know, playing games to check your knowledge of the Bible and quizzes that's very interesting just to play and answer these questions. But, you know, we can extend this into a lot more, in a lot more creative ways, all with the object of building people up, right? So we're using it in a very positive way to build people up in the Word of God and how to apply the Word of God. So just mentioning these two things, entertainment and gaming, because these are also things where people are engaging, people are being involved, whether it's from a believer's perspective or from people in the world who don't know God, don't know the Lord, they're all involved. And if we as the church can do nice things, very creative things and produce them, it'll definitely get the attention both of the church and also of people outside the church, administer to them, serve them and be a blessing to them. Okay. So that's all I wanted to say about entertainment and gaming. I'll put a few notes together and share that with you. Any questions before we change topic? All right, Ash has a question. If an unbeliever friend invites us to their home and have a movie time, if they put their choice, like which we never grew up watching, that is not appropriate, how can we raise it out of our mind? Pass it like our eyes are like a window to our soul, especially when you're trying to reach them out, reach out to them. Please help. Please. I guess you're saying to understand this. Okay. So now, so I think, yeah, so suppose you're going to go to a friend's house and they're about to place something, you know, watch them, they say, watch a movie. Now, of course, they are friends, maybe, you know, in school or college or workplace, whatever, neighbor or something, and they're not believers. And they say, come home. And suddenly they say, hey, we want to, can you all want to watch a movie? Now, of course, you do have one thing you can do is to kind of present your choice. You know, obviously, people are going to ask what kind of movie you like, or would you like to watch this? And then if it's something that's violent or, you know, something that's indecent, you can obviously say, hey, can we watch something else? Or I'm not so comfortable with this kind of movies. It doesn't suit my preference or something. So basically, in a nice way, we are guiding the choice of what movie is to something that's clean, neutral, and that you can watch. So that's one thing that we can do. The second thing is, in case it so happens that they're already watching a movie that's not decent, I mean, either you could excuse yourself or if those images, like you're mentioning here, if those images have gone into your mind, then you will fully clean it out. You say, in the name of Jesus, I reject all of those evil things, ungodly things that gain entrance into my mind while I was in that place or rejected. I give it no room to stay. And you don't recall. Don't bring it back to your mind. Even if those images come back, you say, and soon it will go away, because if we don't recall, we don't bring it back to our memory, it's going to slowly be taken off from memory. And then we clean our minds, of course, with the word of God. God's word is what cleanses our minds. We read the word and being in the word and refusing to recall those things, our mind will be cleaned out from those images that may have, you know, gained access in. Is that okay? Anything else that anybody wants to discuss now about entertainment, gaming? We just mentioned them in passing. All right. So now I want to kind of move into some a little bit more serious practical content. And I want to start talking about basically we're going to now move into this whole thing about, you know, how do we leverage the Internet for the things that we are doing? So chapter 11, this chapter, so I need to give you some notes on the previous chapters that I've just spoken to you about on print media and radio, television, films, then entertainment and gaming. I'll put some thoughts down on that. Now, we want to get into some serious stuff because these are things that all of us would be using on a day-to-day basis. And we are beginning to, or we leverage the Internet and do these things. So I want to talk about digital communications and engagement and then we kind of get into additional topics all centered around how the Internet begins to play its role or plays its role in how we do media, how we do ministry today. So for all of us in Christian ministry, you know, whether you are going to be setting up a church or some other form of ministry, we will have to engage with people digitally, right? In times past, you know, we would write letters or we would send people printed mail. That was a big thing, maybe 20 years ago or and before when you post letters to people and things like that, send magazines, newsletters, so on. But these days, that form of communication is almost obsolete and a lot of communication is happening digitally to various channels. So we call it omni-channel communication. There's multiple channels that we have to engage. It's almost become, you know, I would say a requirement for ministries to engage with their people who remember you're serving through multiple channels. We can't say, this is the only way I will engage with you. That usually becomes very difficult. So you have to engage with people and so many channels digitally. So I just want to cover some of the major main ways that we engage with people and just share some guidance on it, some information for many of you. Maybe this is common knowledge and you're already doing it for some of us. Maybe it's things that we can take into the future when you set up your ministry or you start pastoring or you start your ministry. You can think about these things. So we'll be talking about websites and emails, messaging, virtual meetings, digital content platforms, having an app, doing podcasts and those kinds of things. And I just want to share some lessons, some things we learned, what we should do, we should not do, we made mistakes and we learned through the process of all of that. So to begin with, we need to have strategy, meaning some sort of a thought-out plan. How are we going to engage with people inside the church and outside the church? Because the way we engage with people inside the church and the way we engage with people outside the church is going to be obviously different. The content we create, for instance, is going to be different. We don't necessarily put out the same content for both inside and outside. Sometimes it can benefit both groups. But most often, how the content is going to differ because those outside may not understand all the deep things we say for the people who already are familiar with the scriptures and so on. For people outside, we may need some small steps, like maybe they may want to join an email list in a particular area of interest. They may want to ask for prayer. They may want to see what is this church all about. They may want to look chickens out on social media or you can give them an helpful resource, like on parenting or marriage or overcoming certain things. So things that are of interest to them. You will deal with them on that. Whereas on those inside the church, the digital communications, the digital content is usually on discipleship. And how to make them stronger in their faith, how to get them equipped for ministry, and then to be part of certain activities in the church, whether it's a small group, whether it's getting serving in church, whether they may want to get baptized, things like that. So the needs that we are trying to address and the way we address people inside and outside the church vary are different. So at a very basic level, when we need a photo church or for your ministry, you need to think about how you're going to do this. And so here are some basic questions that we can ask. Okay, so who are the people that we are trying to reach? So people inside the church, who are the people inside the church? For example, if I talk about APC in Bangalore, then I would say, hey, 60% of the people inside the church coming to our church are youth, or 60% are below 35. So that's a big chunk of people. And then you've got the remaining 40% that make up 35+. So the majority of the church are young people in the church. Then I would say these people are mobile, upwardly, professionally mobile. That means, and I'm just describing our congregation. I'm not saying this is true for everybody. I'm just saying you need to understand the people you're ministering to. And so I'm just giving this as an example. So I would say the other thing I would say, the people that are ministered inside the church are professionally mobile. That means they are going to be in our city in the church for maybe an average period of five years and five to seven years. And it's very likely at the end of that period, they're going to relocate and they're going to move to some other part of the world. That's just a trend within our congregation. They're an upwardly mobile congregation. It's the other segment. That means those who are on the other side of 40 who most likely may stay on in the city. Again, they are not sure. They also could move, but that would be the general trend. But everyone below 40 is highly likely within the next five to seven years, they're going to be moving. And I would say the third characteristic of the congregation is there are always a steady inflow of new people. So there are people constantly moving out and there's also people moving in because a lot of people are coming into the city, mainly for two reasons, education and profession. So people are coming into the city constantly, then they find us, they come to church. So there are new people coming in. People generally after a period of five to seven years, they're ready to move out, they get married, or the job changes, they move out. Now outside the church, okay, here whom should we meet, whom should we target? Because the composition of the inside of the church is a certain demographic, our immediate response would be, hey, we want to target a similar demographic outside the church because that they will, the ones would make an easy connect with the congregation inside. So therefore, who are these people? They are people who are in our city, who are either in schools, colleges, working professionally. They are in these areas, in these marketplace segments. And so we begin to target them. And of course we need to know where do they spend their time in the digital world so that we can reach them there. So like that, we can think through on some basic questions. What are their needs? So think about your congregation. What are their needs, the needs of these people? And you understand it. So then the content that we develop should address those needs. So of course in the teaching and the preaching, you should be bringing God's word, explaining God's word to them in the things that matter to them. Another question we can ask, you know, where and how are they going to interact digitally with the church and ministry? What are their likely touch points with the church in the digital world? You know, so you should understand that, hey, the majority of our congregation, they like to interact like this. People outside the church whom we are trying to reach, they would interact like this. Now again, people outside the church could be believers outside the church, meaning because this is a digital space, you're not constrained in any way geographically. So when you say outside the church, you can look at the church outside the church or you can look at the world outside the church. Look at both segments, right? Because the digital content that you develop could serve both these spaces. So it's okay, we are developing digital content and this content could be useful to the church outside our church, our congregation. So that is a global reach. Some of the content you develop could serve the world outside the congregation. That is those who don't know Christ yet, right? So think of both. Then think of what channels would you use to serve them. There are these people likely to consume the content you develop, what would be the best places, right? So then that would determine how you distribute your content to them. What are the objectives? What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to equip them? Are you trying to bring them to faith in Christ? Are you trying to get them to engage with the activities of the church? Are you trying to get them to come to certain outreach events? So there are different objectives that you can think of, right? And so then for those objectives, there has to be specific content that's developed. And then of course we also need to think about what's going on, evaluate the progress, modify, keep changing, and then go through the whole evaluation process again. So this thought process must be, it's an ongoing thing, right? Something we decided three years ago may no longer be relevant today because things have changed so fast. So we need to rethink. And sometimes we may need to change. We need to modify this whole digital engagement strategy. We need to rethink, redo. And there's nothing wrong with that because things are changing around us. So this is just a simple table for thinking through on a digital engagement strategy for your church or for your ministry. Ask these basic questions. Nothing complicated in relation to the people that you're going to sell. Let me pause here. Let me just see if we are all together. Everybody's with me. I know I've kind of shifted direction. Yeah, everybody's with me so far. Any questions so far on this? Just introducing the topic. Let's move forward. Now, it's important in what we are doing digitally to evaluate progress. And that means how do we know that we're actually being effective? So, for example, you produce some video content or you produce content on your website. So many things you can do. Sometimes some people may write blogs. Some people may create a podcast. Some people may produce digital books or so many things. How do we know it's actually being useful to people or it's making a difference in people's lives or that we are achieving our objectives? So we need to evaluate progress. Now, the thing is we need to differentiate when we talk about measuring value, the difference between what we would refer to as vanity metrics and what are the real things we need to ask, be looking at. So sometimes these metrics, meaning number of views, number of likes, number of shares, maybe, shares are useful, but views, likes, they sometimes could be very misleading, right? They may not be actually reflecting the accomplishing of our objectives. So, for example, we know, right, when you put out a video or let's say, you know, whatever length of video is, a view often is just if they watch a few seconds. This depends on what kind of content you have. If you're putting out an ad, if they watch the first five seconds, it's counted as a view, right? So, okay, let's say you run an ad and, you know, you get a, you know, you run a 60-second ad on YouTube and, you know, YouTube is showing you, you've got, you know, so many thousands of views. It doesn't mean that many people actually watched your video for entire 60 seconds. All it means is it's giving you some, you know, actually we don't know exactly, but it could give so many, they watched at least five seconds of that 60 seconds. That's counted as a view. Now, they watched five seconds. It's counted as a view, so they've missed major part of what you'd put out, right? We don't know how many seconds. Of course, you can look at the metrics and say, you know, what percentage, how much they watched. You can get some averages, but it doesn't reflect in the actual view that you see the view count. So those kind of things, you know, are not a correct picture. So for example, how many people are, how many subscribers we have on your channel? Well, you may have so many subscribers. Does it mean all the subscribers are watching all the content you're putting out? No. It's nice to have a large number of subscribers, but there's no guarantee that they're going to be consuming everything you put out, right? But then what are the questions, some real questions we need to ask, you know, are we reaching new people? How many people are taking the first step? So how would you know you're reaching new people online? Well, of course, you can look at the number of people interacting with the content, but then from there, are they coming to your event? Are they coming to your service? Are they connecting to the church or whatever? Are they going past that view, past that first initial connect digitally to something that you can say, yeah, this is a person that we have reached online, right? Are they taking the first step? You can then look at the names, you know, that being added to your list or the database. Are people finding us online? So, okay, you have a website and so on. How many people are coming to church? Because they saw you online, right? So then that gives a good reflection of the effectiveness of your website or the ad or the content that you put out. And are you helping people move along their journey, you know, from the first step to the next step? So these are some tough questions to ask because this kind of gives us the real effectiveness of what we're doing as opposed to just like, okay, I got so many views and I got so many subscribers and so many people happen to, you know, see the website. That is good. I'm not saying they're bad. Yeah, it gives you some idea, but that may not be giving you the true effectiveness of what we are doing. The real effectiveness of what we're doing is in our people moving forward in their transformative process in their spiritual journey. So while we look at both sets of numbers, we need to understand them correctly. One is giving you some idea of what's happening in the digital world. The other is giving you insight into what's happening in people's lives. And these are two different things. I hope I made myself clear. Are you following me? Everybody's very quiet, so I don't know if I got the point across. You're following me. Okay, all right, fine. Any questions? Okay, so just an example, you know, we'll talk a few examples and then we'll close. So let's understand, you know, these metrics that YouTube, Facebook and Instagram gives is telling us, okay, in the digital world, this is what's happening. But what we need to probe and find out is what's happening in the lives of people. And that's a true effectiveness of what we're doing. How would we do that? You know, I mean, you could just think of something here. Suppose you had, okay, now, you know, in the past we used to give out physical cards for people to fill out. And we still do it for those who come in person. But then there are people watching us online. So what we do is, hey, go online and, you know, connect with us online. So if they do that and they give you a comment saying, hey, this message blessed me. I was watching your sermon and, you know, this, this has happened in my life. Well, that one person is telling you how they were affected. So that's a count. You can say, hey, so and so was truly affected. That's a tangible real life transformation happening. Or if you are doing, you know, a webinar and so on. And say, you know, and especially this, this was true, you know, during the pandemic when we, when people moved a lot of things online and people started connecting online and you were doing on topics that were very relevant, especially during those days. And some of it is still relevant, you know, in now that we've come out of the pandemic. We're talking about these things. And okay, people are connecting. So there you can see that these people are participating in something you're offering. That's a real number. You know, if 20 people attended your online business seminar or Christian business or Christian professionals think, hey, that's 20 people you're affecting. That's a real, that's a real number. So some churches, you know, they read their website to preach people into positioning their website as something for their church. They position their website for people who are seeking, you know, and they want to begin their journey of faith. So now you can, they read it, read on their website. Now you can look at, okay, are people actually using this resource in the journey of faith? How many people are actually using the resource? Okay, that's a measure of lives that are being touched and the effectiveness of this repositioning that has happened through the website. Okay, that's a real measure. Or if you're doing a podcast on marriage, how many people are being, you know, responding to that podcast and they're connecting with people? So are new people listening to it and then connecting to the church? Okay, that's a real measure of a life change. A life transformation, right? And if so many couples participated and a third of them were new to the church, then you can say, hey, this online retreat or seminar actually helped us reach new people, about 300 new people, new couples. So you can say, yeah, this is a real number of lives being changed. All right, so I'm just kidding. So there's just some examples where you can think about, you know, this is a real count of life change, therefore effectiveness of our digital engagement. This is real. You know, we are engaging with people digitally, various forms of the website or seminars or whatever. And these are real numbers of people being changed. That shows, yeah, whatever you've done is effective. Okay, so just to close out here, you know, think about, you know, if you example, if you're thinking about teens, young adults, what would be a digital engagement strategy for them? So how would you start thinking about it? You would say, okay, let's see what are the main digital platforms where these people are engaging? You can look at it, look it up online if you want. And then think through those questions we put up in the table earlier. And how are you going to engage with this particular demographic? Right? So you can then begin to think about what content are you going to develop for this group of people? How are you going to deliver it to them? And then how are you going to measure the effectiveness? And in measuring, look at life change, not just, you know, how many people say, people give a thumbs up or a like, right? Look at actual life change. That's where you can determine the effectiveness of what's happening. I'm going to pause here. There's a lot more we're going to cover in this thing, but we'll get into it. And I'll share some of our learnings and experiences as we go forward in this. Any questions before we leave? Okay. Thank you. Okay. If there are no questions, we'll close. We'll continue this digital engagement. Sorry, tomorrow. Yeah, we have it tomorrow. I said next week. Yeah. Let's close in prayer, please. Somebody could close in prayer. Then we'll dismiss. Please go ahead. Thank you for teaching us those beautiful things, Father, to reach out the utmost to the maximum people in the ways that can impact their lives. And we are so very thankful to you that you're teaching us bit by bit. And as we are learning, Father, may it be retained in us, may it be used by us to reach out the multitudes, Father, and bring a difference to the society, to the nations and to the church as well, Father. In all ways, Father, lead us and guide us and bless Pastor and all the students to use it for your glory and for your kingdom expansion. In Jesus' name we pray and thank you. Amen. Amen. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow. God bless. Bye now. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.