Are you involved in a ministry that oversees, teaches, or helps church leaders?
If so, have you ever been frustrated by the inability of some small churches to utilize your ideas? No doubt you have.
Here’s a simple illustration that will show you why that happens a lot. And how we can help each other get better at this.
Responsive Design Is The Industry Standard
What size of screen are you using right now? If it’s a phone, the screen looks very different than if you’re reading this on a laptop or a tablet.
That’s the result of something called responsive design — programming that automatically re-formats what you see based on the size of the screen you’re using.
When you’re on a bigger screen, like a laptop, you’ll see more options on the page, like a sidebar, floating social media buttons, and so on. If you’re on a small screen, like a phone, you’ll see less. Maybe just a few paragraphs of text to scroll through. You’ll need to hit a drop-down to get other options because of the limited space.
Responsive design has been an industry standard for well over a decade. But in 2019, Hertz (the car rental company) sued Accenture (a tech company) for 32 million dollars because, according to Hertz, Accenture didn’t deliver a new website as requested. One of their biggest failures was in responsive design. The website didn’t adapt properly for some smaller screen sizes.
So what does this have to do with church leadership?
Plenty.
Do Your Church Leadership Principles Adapt For Size?
There are some very creative people producing new church-leadership tools for everything from discipleship, to worship, to small groups.
Most of these innovations are very helpful—if you’re doing ministry in a large church. But most churches are small, and many of those programs don’t adapt for our size.
Take a look at your principles, your programs, your ideas, and your innovations. Have you built them to be responsive for churches from 2,000 to 200 to 20? If not, you’re behind the times. And you need to catch up.
It’s not enough to say “our product may come from a big-church standpoint, but you can adapt it for your size.”
Not anymore.
It’s not the responsibility of the small church to adapt your ideas for our size. It’s your responsibility to build responsive design into your product to be usable in all church sizes.
Responsive design isn’t an option anymore, it’s a requirement.
But here’s the good news. Just like responsive design for devices is easier than ever (it only cost me $50 to make this website responsive), responsive design for different church sizes is easier than ever.
All we need is the foresight to see it and the will to do it.
Don’t Know How To Adapt? Find Out
Was your idea birthed in a big church context? That’s great. Most mobile apps were designed on a big screen desktop computer. But they aren’t limited to the device they were designed on. We need to do the same in church leadership.
Go ahead and create a great new idea in your big-church context. But make sure to include responsive design for all church sizes.
We can’t blame small churches for not being able to adapt big-church ideas to their context any more than a web designer can blame a user for not being able to adapt their laptop design for use on a cell phone.
Adapting big-church concepts into a small-church context isn’t the responsibility of the end user — in this case, the small church pastor. Like website designers, the primary responsibility for the usability of what you’re making and selling lies in the hands of the design team, not the pastors you’re supposed to be designing it for.
Each specific congregation has unique characteristics that we have to transpose for, but there’s a lot you can do to meet us halfway.
So how does that process begin, especially if you’ve never worked in a small-church context?
Here’s a starter list:
5 Steps To Build Responsive Design For Church Size
1. Ask small-church leaders for input
Sit down with some small-church pastors. Ask them what works for them and what doesn’t. What is universal and what isn’t. What can be adapted for different sizes and what can’t.
Keep what works for bigger churches, but offer options that can be used in other church sizes.
2. Put people with a small-church background on the design/writing team
But be sure their small-church experience is current or recent. If they haven’t been in a small church in a decade, a lot has changed since then.
3. Ask small churches to test it
There are so many congregations that would love to do this and give you helpful feedback!
4. Label it accurately
If your materials or ideas have responsive design built in, let us know. If not, let us know that, too. Something as simple as putting “Field-tested to work in churches under 200”, or “Works best in churches over 200” on the package will help us make wiser decisions.
5. Price it accordingly
A sliding price scale for church size will help a lot.
If you already offer discounted or free materials for smaller congregations, make that information more readily known.
We Need Each Other
Small churches aren’t lesser versions of big churches any more than a cell phone is a lesser version of a laptop. We’re something else entirely.
We can and want to learn from each other. If you have a great new idea, program, or system, we want to use it. But it needs to fit our screen.
If you build it, we’ll use it.
And if you don’t know how to get there, we’ll help.
Just ask. We’re in this together.
(Photo by Luke Wroblewski | Flickr)
