July 25 is the date ... Trinity's Staff will spend a half day retreat grappling with the issue of "Target Audience." Like the Disciples before us, we want to be people of great prayer and receive supernatural insight from Almighty God as to what He desires us to do. We are all in agreement about one thing: the Great Commission IS NOT an option! And yet the resources that God has placed in our hands limits our reach. Bottom line... we want to reach as many as possible in the greater Sunnyvale area. And one viable strategy is to "target" a focused, clearly defined audience of people who then assist in the development and makeup of our church. By successfully attracting this audience, we will also attract many who are outside of this particular audience. After all, everybody likes being around exciting, vibrant, on fire for Jesus churches, right? It was David McNeely who probably coined the term Trinity 2.0. I like it ... I like it a lot. So perhaps we can call our target audience Trinity 2.0. Please lift up the Staff as we go to work discovering who God is shaping us to be in the years to come. In the meantime, take a look at the following. If you have any idea what the heck this is ... you're probably Trinity 2.0!
4 comments:
Great! I'm glad this is carrying a sense of urgency.
But let's not get carried away here. Presumably, not every person in our target audience will want to bring their Sony UX micro PCs and find Damascus online while hearing about Paul's conversion.
Having lived at the epicenter of dot-com-to-dot-bomb, let's not put our definition in terms of the tech-of-the-moment!
The tech is a way that elements of the target audience may communicate. Other important elements to consider include:
* What is life bringing that audience that may have them thinking about Jesus?
* In what ways can Christians -- at Trinity -- be saying "Yes" and serving this audience, rather than being dismissable as people fixated on saying "No?"
* What understanding, opinions, and misconceptions might members of this audience have formed about God's perfection, humankind's failures, Christ's sacrifice, and his Lordship?
* How does the audience answer Pilate's question: "What is truth?" Pilate didn't seem to be looking for an answer. Are they? Who/what do they trust?
I like the geeky stuff, and I'm not actually afraid we'll define them exclusively in terms of tech. But we really have to figure out who the people in the audience are, and what they're like, so that we can purposefully and appropriately use tech -- and other appropriate tools -- to reach them.
We are on the same page, Mike! I am not suggestion that the technology will exclusively characterize Trinity 2.0. On the other hand, church history has shown some interesting target audience definitions which were quite effective (though I think that they were whacked!). For instance, many churches use demographics to exclusively target. It makes sense and is very logical. My only issue is that it can smell of human accomplishment to attract a crowd through a statistical, demographical analysis report. Still, it's a good method. A lot of churches target based on race and culture almost exclusively. This certain has merits and works very well in many parts of the world. I think it would suck in the Silicon Valley ... uhhhhhhhh ... which culture are we anyway?
What I like about the Trinity 2.0 concept is that it begins somewhere and it makes sense to those of us in the Silicon Valley. We are currently posting on a blog site which is absolutely free of charge. I am amazed at how many forums and online communities are free. Now why is that? And why are they so popular? The answer to that question takes us even deeper into the refinement of Trinity 2.0, right? It says that these are people whose sum of character consists more than electronic toys. They are searching for something (we know that they are actually searching for someone). My point is that by starting with the concept of Trinity 2.0, it takes us down this path of target audience discovery.
Okay, let me comment in a whole 'nuther direction.
What is July 25 going to be about? What input is expected from the participating staff, and how will that input be synthesized into something? What will that "something" be (i.e., what is the deliverable)?
If the desire is to receive insight from God, Acts describes that process happening when Christ's followers were in one accord - are you there? How can you use the 20 days leading up to this retreat to get the most out of it?
Hi all, just read this blog from the Trinity site. It's a timely topic 9 months later. Should we get some more posts to this blog?
Looking forward to seeing more.
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