Church going Mobile? Not a matter of if but How

How is your Church going Mobile?

We’ve come to the point where it is no longer just cool for your church to have an iPhone app but necessary for your church to think about what type of strategy it will have for mobile devices. It’s not a matter of if your church should be thinking mobile but how will your church go mobile in 2011.  Why do I say this? It’s not just because I own a company who gets churches onto mobile devices but because the message of the church is being lost on the phone.

YouVersion recently announced that they had their Bible app downloaded over 10,000,000 times.  Over half of those downloads were on iPhone and the platform that was catching up the most was Android.  10 million people interacting, reading, and enjoying the Bible all on their phone or mobile device.    Knowing this I am still amazed by how many church leaders say, “I don’t know if we need an app, we have a website.” YouVersion had a mobile website before it had its first app.  They could have said that was enough but they instead came out with a full strategy of getting people into the Bible.  They made the Bible as accessible as possible and as a result people responded.  Congrats to my friends at YouVersion for all of their hard work.

The church needs to be thinking about how accessible their message is and mobile is just one vehicle but a very important one now.  We can’t simply ignore it anymore.  Having a website is only part of an overall strategy and that strategy doesn’t cover the phone.  Sure people can find your church’s website on an iPhone or other smartphone but the experience of your church’s website is subpar at best and not very accessible in most cases.  It’s like trying to put out a fire with a garden hose.  It can be done but it is not very effective.

I believe one of the goals of the church should be to make its message as accessible as possible with the best experience as possible. In the world we live in and in the time we live in that means the phone has to be a priority.

This post is not about whether your church needs an iPhone app, an Android App, a Blackberry App or a HTML5 Web app.  The point is that your church needs to be on the phone even more so today than it needs to have a website for computers.  I will talk more about the strategy of your church going mobile in my next post but I hope that you see that if your church isn’t thinking mobile then its message is being lost on the one device that people carry with them every where they go.