🐖 I Almost Lost $260K

Greetings in Christ, Reader,

And welcome back to the marketing newsletter for those who try to lay low after Easter.

I have an embarassing story to tell you today. I almost lost $260K for one of the churches I serve.

We'll be taking up the following topics:

The quick and easy way to nuke your church's website.
Be nice to the bots and other curios from around the web.
How and why 20th Century Lutherans (like Werner Elert) got some things wrong.
How I almost lost $260K for my church because I wanted the predictability of privacy

📺 Don't Nuke Your Church Website [YouTube Video]

Did you know that lots of churches tell Google: "Nuke my church's website."? I take that issue up in my latest YouTube video.

🌐Around the Web

This is a big one for churches: Google now has an AI-powered "Ask Maps" feature embedded in many of their maps products. I asked it to recommend a church in Door County for me. This is what happened:

The takeaway from this for your church? Your Google Business Profile only continues to increase its margin (a wide one!) as your church's most important digital asset. Your church's comms director in all likelihood isn't super excited about your Google Business Profile. (She's probably all-in on Instagram, a platform that is hyper-saturated and thus pretty hard for churches to compete in.) Honestly, you should probably direct her to put major efforts into your Google Business Profile. Did you see how important reviews were in that video? That should give you a clue about a major place to focus her efforts.

AI search tends to be conversational, and Google's Liz Reid says that this is changing how they handle search. One takeaway for churches from this article: Google's AI products agentically conduct "fan-out queries" to glean relevant information in order to synthesize a good answer for the user. This means that your church website needs to be built for robots as much as for humans. While that user may not land on your site, you still feed him information via the bots that access your site.

A Harvard study showed that AI outperformed two ER doctors in offering correct diagnoses. What kind of implications do you think this might have for ailments of the heart and soul?

The Buddhists may not quite trust the bots to provide spiritual guidance yet, but they did recently make one a monk.

Speaking of monks, this time Christian ones, researchers are using AI in the quest to identify medieval scribes.

🙏 God Stuff

The last few years I've been struck by Paul's assertions (in multiple places!) that God has made Himself abundantly knowable in the natural realm.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ (Acts 17:26, ESV)

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:19-21, ESV)

The upshot of Paul's message: God and His goodness is imminently knowable in the natural realm. However, humanity has chosen to use this knowledge not for the sake of giving God the thanks and praise that He is due, but rather used it in rebellion against Him, giving themselves over to impure lives and the worship of false gods.

And, this is why all humanity sits under God's righteous judgment.

This is a very different message than was taught among many Lutherans in the 20th Century. In the wake of the World Wars, many Lutherans taught that

A) God as He is perceived in the natural world, if he even can be perceived in the natural world, is a menace

B) God's judgment can never be considered 'just' from a worldly lens

These ideas were especially put forward by Werner Elert and were reiterated by many other teachers as well. Sadly, I myself was influenced by them early on in my theological journey.

I'm far over it with these ideas, praise be to God. But instead I am glad to affirm the teaching of the Small Catechism in the First Article: That God's goodness is abundantly clear in the created realm, and for all this it is our duty to thank, praise, serve, and obey Him.

A little bit more on this topic, below: 👇

🥸 How Hiding from Chaos Almost Cost My Church $260K

Even as God makes Himself utterly findable and knowable, my encouragement for you today is to do the same in various aspects of your life. Certainly when it comes to your church's marketing, but in other areas as well.

There's a strange paradox happening in America. On the one hand, our lives have never been more on display. People post pictures of themselves on the open internet all the time. What in other times might have been a semi-private moment now can become public fodder online. All of us are one moment away from viral attention that we may or may not want.

On the other hand, and probably partly in reaction to the publicization of life, we see a radical shift to privitization. Our private lives are becoming more private.

Homes are becoming more private. Homes used to be a locus of public activity. Not so much anymore. The shift from front porches to back decks happened almost a half century ago, and that shift continues. People are entertaining less. People are reluctant to make the shift toward publicness that always occurs with having a family. Fewer people set up a home with a spouse. Even the married are more they hesitant to invite into their homes those strangers known as children, who themselves will widen the scope of the home with friends and eventually spouses and grandchildren.

Clubs, bars, churches - all of these see fewer and fewer people making use of them.

Opening our lives up to others is always an invitation to chaos. A marriage will, ideally, lead to a life of mutual support and blessing. But, it also means forging a life with someone who will not always see things the way we do or act in ways we understand. Children are always a blessing. However, they also wake us up at odd hours, get into trouble at school, and can make huge messes. Walking down a street in a big city might mean encountering amazing street performers. but it may also mean being accosted by panhandlers.

More and more people, it seems, are choosing the predictability of privacy over the chaos that a more public life might bring.

That's an instinct I've had in many areas, and it almot cost one of my churches - big time. When you are a pastor, you can often get lots of phone calls trying to get things from you. Dealing with scammers is an almost daily occurence.

Because of this, many years ago I had set the answering machine for one of my churches to answer on the first ring, and I almost never checked messages. By almost never, I mean that I would go for months without checking messages. I figured that anyone who needed to reach me had my cell phone number and could get ahold of me.

But, one day, I decided to pick up when the phone rang. It was a lawyer who worked for a wealth management firm. One of her clients had bequeathed the church $260K. She had been trying to reach us for quite some time and was almost going to give up reaching out.

My desire for privacy did what I wanted it to. It protected me from the chaos of scammers. But it almost prevented my church from receiving an incredible blessing.

It's that same impulse to privacy that keeps churches from being blessed in other ways, as well. A common thing I have seen on many church websites is a sitewide noindex tag. This usually happens when a church selects the setting in their CMS to "Discourage search engines from indexing your site." I think the logic goes something like this: "Why would I let these megacorporation bots have free access to my site?"

And, admittedly, giving search engines and AI crawler bots access to your site invites a certain level of chaos. Scammers and spammers can discover your site and make your life a little less pleasant. AI bots have gotten so aggressive with their crawling of sites that they can actually degrade site performance. And, they are making huge money off on you in the process!

But, if you choose the easy path here, you are also closing your site off to basically everybody. The 82 year-old man who realizes that he's not long for this world and wants to get right with God. The young mother who wants to get back into church so that her children know the Lord. The couple with a struggling marriage that need to find the sermon you posted on what a godly marriage looks like. None of them will find you or your message if you tell the bots "Stay Out."

Out of the eternal love shared between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God created this world. It's as if that eternal love was so over-abundant that it could not be contained, but overflowed into the creation of the world. That creative work of God was worked upon the primordial chaos, out of which He has brought great blessing. And while we sinners have undone that ordering work with the disorder of our transgressions, God did not remain aloof, but instead entered into this chaotic place in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, Our Lord. And, God continues to do this today in His sanctifying work as He conveys the grace won for us by Christ in Word and Sacrament through these messy, chaotic institutions - local churches.

All that is to say that God Himself is no stranger, cooped up in private and inaccessible places. Instead, He has blessed us in the midst of chaos in creation, redemption, and sanctification. Therefore as Christians, we are encouraged and empowered to imitate Him in this way. Privacy can be a great good. But as with any good, it can also be twisted into evil.

Being known and being findable - being public - inevitably brings chaos this side of heaven. But, in God's good way, He can and does work that chaos to our good and the good of others. Where is the impulse to extreme privacy closing you off to being blessed and blessing others?

God's blessings,