Seth Godin spoke at Catalyst this week. If you’re not familiar with who he is, he’s a marketing expert who’s written several books about the topic. His blog is one of my favorites, so I was pretty stoked to get the opportunity to be hear him speak.

He spoke about “tribes,” which wasn’t much of a surprise since that is the title of his new book. In a nutshell, the theory is this: top-down targeted marketing doesn’t work anymore. The new way to market your product is to get people to connect with other people who use your product so that they sell it to each other. So the best way to sell more widgets is to create a culture of people who not only use your product, but who want to hang out with other people that use your product.

At first glance, it really makes a lot of since for churches. Most of us have already been doing this forever. We have groups for men and women and youth and singles and anything else. When people connect to other similar people, it creates a connection that keeps them coming back to church, and hopefully work of the kingdom gets done.

But as a non-Christian, what Seth doesn’t understand is that our goal isn’t to grow our congregation or to connect people to other people. These are just byproducts of a higher calling: to help people connect to God.

As people working in any kind of church communications, we’ve got something that nobody else does. We aren’t trying to make people feel good in order for them to “buy-in” to to what we’re pushing. We are communicating the truth so that the Holy Spirit can work in the lives of those who are called. (Romans 9 and 10)

Here is the danger: if our churches are growing for any reason other than the work of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives, it’s not work worth doing. If we want to just do good works, we can join Habitat for Humanity or the Red Cross. If we want to entertain, we should get into show business. But either of those would be selling ourselves short of our greatest purpose which is to reveal the Kingdom of God.

“Everybody who does this job only lasts about two years. Then you’ll snap and move on to do something more worthwhile.”

This is how I was introduced to my new job as my church’s Technical Director (TD). I was 20 years old, and didn’t know DMX from XLR. The person speaking had been the TD at a nearby church. He’d been there two years.

I went to our lunch meeting that day ready to get some tips from someone who had been working in the tech ministry for a while, so these weren’t exactly the words I was hoping to hear. He went on to paint a picture of his constant humiliation and frustration from worship leaders and pastors during his two year tenure. He told me about being working seven days a week, being humiliated by kids in the youth group, and about screaming matches with him and the people he worked with.

The lesson I learned that day wasn’t what I had hoped to learn, but it was clear: technical ministries is hard. And it’s not the technical part of the equation that’s hard... it’s the ministry part. My friend never mentioned technical problems as a source of his frustration, only relational problems. From that day forward it was clear that to be successful in tech ministry, relationships and attitude have to be a number one priority.

Churches everywhere do the same thing: they need help with their “sound and stuff,” so they recruit the geekiest person in the congregation (that’s me too). We are excited to help and we get to play with cool toys. This stuff comes natural to us. If we get stuck or just want improve our skills, there are thousands of resources to learn how to mix audio, create cool graphics in Photoshop, or how to light a stage. But when it comes to the ministry part of technical ministries, the resources are more sparse (besides our Bibles of course).

So, with that in mind, WorshipTechie.com is born. I hope it becomes a valuable resource that encourages those who are involved in tech and media towards God-honoring ministry. Consider that our mission statement.