Mobile Ministry Magazine (MMM)

It can be well argued that in the early stages of MMM that there was the position of “if its mobile, then its an answer for ‘X’.” Over the years, its been good to mature from that point of view, yet still hold onto the focus that there are indeed benefits to communication, engagement, and sharing the Gospel with mobile technology as an agent. Recent conversations have helped this maturing perspective, though there’s a good bit more work that’s needed.

My mother used to quote to me Proverbs 4:7 to me quite often (wisdom is the principle thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding). As it relates to the use of mobile technology within faith-based initatives, there’s a good bit of direction that such a verse gives. There’s the acquistion of knowledge with which to build wisdom and understanding. There’s the experiential factor of success and failure for various implementations of that knowledge (which leads to understanding). And then there’s an ability to reteach and relearn concepts related to that initial knowledge acquisition, but do so with a somewhat clearer lens than times previous.

The difficult thing is that aspect though to get wisdom. Wisdom isn’t so much that you can get by attending a class, finding a resource guide, or even experimenting. Wisdom comes after all of those, plus the greying of time and focus, to see what is the implication of decisions made towards and with digital technologies in lieu of the presented contexts (or environments).

For example, knowledge can tell us that to increased access to technology doesn’t guarantee increased educational advancement. Wisdom takes that study and asks about the methods employed, investigates the people and contextual concerns, and then in as unbiased a manner as possible, analyizes the proposed and realized positive and negative implications of that technology adoption attempt. Wisdom is careful to attempt this again, but with full understanding of what happens when certain variables are taken/not-taken into consideration. Or, wisdom doesn’t attempt this again, until certain other measures are employed.

This becomes one of the challenges to MMM on the side of training and consulting. Much of what we want to espouse has to do with developing the best or most ideal environments to understand and wisely apply mobile and social-web technologies. This cannot be done where zeal and temperance overburden the level of knowledge that’s present (if you will, the “let’s do it because they are doing it too” mentality). Much has to be done to develop avenues of knowledge building (on our end that’s case studies, resource guide/reports, and speaking engagements) so that there’s suitable understanding on tap to develop wisdom by.

At some point in the (near-ish) future, there will be ample information here and other places onlline and offline that the inital steps towards building understanding and wisdom won’t need as much tilling. At that point, developing solutions for mobile ministry engagement will be less a question of experimentation, and more one of “go and seek those who have already travelled this road.” Until then, this site, like a few others, will serve to learn and disseminate approaches to, and lessons from, the implications of the use of mobile technology in ministry contexts. Then, with those lessons garnered, we will detail the stories of what works and what doesn’t work – with the expectation that those searching for wisdom will not only find it, but become co-laborers in telling this story of what’s possible.