2x2virtualchurch is the web project of Redeemer Lutheran Church in East Falls, Philadelphia, shunned by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. They view us as too small to fulfill any mission purpose and seized our property and locked out our members. 

2x2virtualchurch is now two years old. We started knowing very little about the web but it seemed to be a logical and viable mission opportunity for a congregation raped of its  heritage. 

It’s been a voyage of discovery.

We’ve documented our growth statistics before but in the last month we began to add new dimension to our ministry.

About a month ago, businessesgrow.com (Mark Shaefer’s marketing website) featured a 2×2 guest blog.  

That blog was picked up by five other major blogs including a couple of business web sites and two Christian Social Media web sites. (These are the ones we know about!)

business2community

socialmediatoday

businessesgrow.com

Yesterday, we received a request to participate in a podcast for a Christian Social Media site. At the same time we are about to launch our first multimedia video.

This is all within a few weeks!

So the progression has been:

• 2011: Readership grows from 1 reader per month in February to a few hundred per month
• 2012: Readership grows from an average of 20 readers per day to 50 readers per day
• 2013 to date: Readership grows from 50 readers per day to an average of 90 per day and more than 4000 per month

This makes Redeemer and its 2×2 ministry the congregation with the widest reach in SEPA Synod—which declared us to be closed and unfit to manage our own ministry in 2010. (They wanted our property.)

The lessons to be learned from our ministry:

• Prepare to give a solid year of dedicated work before making any value assessments. 2×2 started to gain momentum when we started posting daily in the summer of 2011.
• Post frequently at least three times a week.
• Look for interests that aren’t being addressed. We discovered a demand for object lessons for adults that draws daily traffic to our site. Churches are also looking for easy dramas—plays that don’t require a lot of costumes and rehearsals. We are trying to figure out how to offer music!
• Your audience is the world once you begin using the web. You can write for just the people who live near you but don’t close the doors on interesting opportunities. We have many stories to tell of how our ministry is impacting the lives of Christians thousands of miles away in surprising and exciting ways.
• Be helpful to your readers. Our free resources geared to small congregations drives our traffic.
• Cast a wider net when fishing for men. Most church web sites are all about them. They may succeed locally with this approach, but they will be missing mission opportunity.
• Don’t look to professional leadership to have the skills needed to forge the way in this type of ministry. They have been busy learning other things. Turn it over to lay people.
• Don’t rely on hierarchical support. They are not likely to understand the potential of the web. They were born of an era when church structure was locally focused with distant oversight. This is not likely to change without a major reformation.
• Don’t expect accolades for your success from the greater church. Again, they frequently don’t understand the web and are still assessing congregational viability by 1950 standards. It will be five years at least before they realize what they are missing. By then things are likely to have changed still more.
• Don’t expect regional bodies to admit their weaknesses.

Where to from here?

2×2 has gained credible blogging skills. We will now look to be adding more video and podcasting and more helpful resources for small church ministry and world mission.

We hope to cooperate with other local ministry efforts, offering our expertise to their causes.

We’ve grown a bit “like Topsy” but we will now become more intentional in creating our ministry plan—something Redeemer was always good at!

We have achieved this success on a $0 budget as our hierarchy claimed all our offerings at the same time it challenged us with legal expenses. We now have a readership base that can monetize our ministry. The economics of scale will allow us to do this at prices far lower than traditional publishing and we will remain dedicated to providing most resources for free as part of our mission.

There is a lot of hard work in learning all these new mission skills. We will be glad to share our experiences with any church interested in diving in!