The Age of Infinite Leverage
New media and how infinite digital content will shape discipleship and mission.
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This newsletter is for ministry leaders (church planters, pastors, creatives, technologists, church staff, nonprofit staff) interested in the larger trends shaping our world, and the implicit opportunities for innovative missional leadership.
I’m going to shift this to a weekly “digest” format, where I curate the articles, resources, and conversations emerging as important cultural, economic, or technological trends, and interpret them through a “missional leadership” filter.
I’ll add my regular analysis articles as we go, or as I have capacity!
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Tyler
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New Media and the Church: The Age of Infinite Leverage
What is new media doing to the church? We are in a massive new frontier: a deluge of infinite content from an infinite wave of creators, increasingly targeted and customized to the consumer, that everyone carries with them at all times.
What might this do to spiritual formation? To evangelism? To the shape of our communities and networks?
I talk to a lot of pastors, church leaders, and church staff about this, looking at the increasing pressures that content hyper-overload puts on our people and ministries. We seem to be pretty unequipped to think clearly about them.
Most leaders, by default, have digital content primarily in a “marketing” or “church growth” mental category, which makes it less central to their overall mission, and in many cases easier to dismiss (“I don’t do marketing”).
But, it’s a false dichotomy, and the big needed shift is helping leaders thoughtfully integrate the digital landscape as part of their “community, discipleship, and mission” pastoral categories.
People are being shaped by digital content. We know that interaction, friend building, tribe-finding, and personal opinions and worldviews are being formed by both the messages and the mediums.
Where is it all going? What are the meaningful patterns to understand this, as we lead our communities and teams? As we preach and think? First, we have to understand the dynamics.
Here are some articles I’ve been reading lately about the new media landscape, and what some of the implications are that I see for churches, networks, and ministries in the seasons ahead.
Email me or leave a comment below with your thoughts!
Articles:
1) The Age of Infinite Leverage - This is a simple article I came across on value.app, which I’ve been enjoying. It gets to the heart of what’s happening.
What’s powerful here is the simple mental model for understanding how the internet redistributes power and incentives for content creation.
The internet, in essence, creates massive leverage for creators. Digital creators have two key advantages: (2) zero marginal cost distribution, meaning they can reach the whole world with a tweet, a post, or a video, and a (2) permissionless economy, which amplifies the voices that are most authentic, consistent, or loud.
The implications here for discipleship are massive - there is an obvious wave of new media brands, channels, creators, and influencers that are coming, to talk about Christianity, the Gospel, and the Church, for better or worse, to whatever audiences will listen.
This includes any number of voices that are un-cautious, un-trustworthy, or downright critical or harmful. The marketplace of available “spiritual content” is only going to grow as more and more people create it.
This isn’t necessarily new, but it’s just the beginning. The future of digital evangelism, discipleship, community building, etc., is going to be shaped by the (young) creators who invest in building digital content, that leverages the internet and finds new audiences.
2) Understanding the Long Tail - Wired Magazine
This leads me to another really important concept for ministry leaders, critical to understanding the future of new media.
Digital media follows a “long tail” distribution. This means, essentially, that 20% of the content will get 80% of the audience, and the remaining content will divvy up the remaining audiences.
This is called the “Long Tail,” which refers to a 2006 book by Chris Anderson. Wired magazine did a great write up on the concept, that I’ve linked here, way back in the day.
Here’s why it matters: Discipleship content - whether sermons, worship songs, personal social media, etc - will follow a long tail shape.
This means that market forces are going to cause the most popular digital media brands to to get bigger (called a “blockbuster” approach), and will pressure everyone else to get more niche in order to engage an audience.
Hillsong Music, Bethel Music, and the “mega” teachers are just the beginning. This will keep happening, and be reinforced by digital feedback loops.
Local churches that are live streaming their sermons and discipling locally will eventually differentiate by focusing as local as possible - on community, relationships, and hyper-local topics.
Christian digital content is going to get much, much bigger, and much, much smaller at the same time.
3) Understanding Aggregation Theory - By Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson is one of my favorite writers, his “Stratechery” blog gives great analysis on on the strategy/business side of technology and media.
He talks often about “Aggregation Theory.”
Essentially, businesses that “aggregate” all of the best content creators and deliver them efficiently to the content consumers, build an infinite feedback loop in a digital economy.
In the ministry world, think of all of the biggest conferences. These conferences find the best current voices and speakers, get them on their platform (whether physical or digital), and build audiences around them. As new voices emerge, they get these voices onto their platforms, and repeat.
The point is, as ministry leaders, we have to understand that there is next to zero intermediation between the people we’re discipling and the biggest emerging content brands - both for general popular content, and discipleship-related content.
This platform-aggregation-curation trend will only continue - I recently came across the first real “Netflix for sermons” built for mobile, and I’m also pretty good friends with the guys at Mighty Pursuit, aimed at curating compelling sermon moments for digital-native unbelievers. This trend is just getting started.
Many churches themselves start to become “curators” as a result - building trust with their congregations and audiences by choosing selectively who can teach, preach, or be quoted. This enhances a sense of trust, but in a way that can reinforce many of the echo-chamber and “tribal” dynamics of new media anyways.
4) The Tenuous Promise of the Substack Dream - Wired Mag
This arms race between content creators, gatekeepers, and consumers isn’t new at all.
Media feedback-loops on the internet seem to create hyper-partisan polarization, which then get entrenched in the business models of major content producers (news organizations in the age of Trump have highlighted this to the extreme).
As a result, we’re seeing massive shakeups in new media. Some of the biggest names in journalism - like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, and more - have left their legacy institutions to start newsletter businesses, direct to their audiences, without the gatekeepers of executive editors or business interests.
This is a major “unbundling,” which in many ways is what happens after the aggregation theory - if a content creator can build their own sufficiently engaged audience, they can own and manage that audience directly. (This is the “1000 true fans” idea). In this framework, your email list is your biggest advantage.
These two trends - aggregation and unbundling - live in a dynamic tension. Even as journalists go independent, other journalists (like Ezra Klein, of Vox, today) are teaming up with other creators to build super-platforms.
You probably don’t think of the New York Times as the “Netflix of News,” but there is a reason they are investing in so much original content from their editorials:
5) Technopolitics - Bruno Maçaes
Bruno Maçaes is a Portuguese politician, author, and strategist, who looks at global affairs through lens of technology. He’s written some incredible books, including The Dawn of Eurasia and History Has Begun.
I commend his work to you simply to understand the global dimensions of what the internet and new media is doing to our social order.
I think there are massive unexplored implications here for the global church as well - if I was Lausanne or the World Evangelical Alliance, I would be building research groups exclusively around this topic, as well as developing deeper global affinity networks for the whole church.
There are still very, very few forums for church leaders in the West to learn from leaders in Africa, Asia, the persecuted world, and more, even though we face many of the same leadership challenges (the pandemic, urbanization, technology, etc).
6) Understanding Twitter’s Fleets - The Platformer
Finally, a quick article to help you make sense of Twitter’s roll out of “Fleets,” it’s Instagram Stories competitor.
I liked the assessment from this blog, which particularly centered on how posting on Twitter can be terrifying for most people - which hurts the quality of the overall conversation. Ephemeral content might be a way to drive engagement.
This comes just as Instagram added Reels, to compete with TikTok, which faces an uncertain future.
What this boils down to from a discipleship and mission perspective, is simply this - everyone’s screen time is going way, way, way up. What’s more, the battlefield of ideas has never been more high stakes, and more public. We have to reckon with this.
Other things I’m reading or thinking about:
I’m really looking forward to this new book from Carl Trueman, a summary on the historical development of our modern “selves.”
Excited to see that a group of pastors has just started the Crete Collective, a church planting network focused on black and brown neighborhoods.
If you like thinking about the future, you’ll love the Rebuilders Podcast, from my friend Mark Sayers (also of This Cultural Moment).
Join our new Missional Society learning community:
I’m beta testing a digital network for emerging missional leaders, to create a space for conversations around ministry leadership, modern culture, technology, innovation, and mission.
The first 100 people will have free access forever.
If you’re a ministry leader under 40 (pastor, church planter, discipleship, creative staff, technologist, nonprofit, whatever), and are working in a primarily secular/urban environment, come join us!
Love this. So looking forward to being along for the ride. Hoping to learn a whole bunch - thanks