One theme I’ve written most about on this platform is the importance of intentionally living near our brothers and sisters in the church. This has meant moving into the same condo buildings or neighbourhoods so that we have regular, spontaneous interactions that strengthen our relationships with each other.
However, we navigate so much of our lives in the digital space. Increasingly, we are ruled by algorithms, AI bots and apps that mostly exist to bear the fruit of discontentment and loneliness in our lives.
Technology has, more often than not, harmed our relationships and connectedness rather than amplifying them. The creation of infinite-scrolling algorithms that continually feed us dopamine hits is perhaps one of the most destructive innovations in modern times, particularly to our relationships.
I was recently on a campus, and it felt like a zombie-land as hundreds upon hundreds of students in the library just scrolled with vacant stares at whatever the algorithm had decided would be sufficiently enticing.
What could it look like if we were to also think about intentional proximity in the digital world?
A Digital Home for Real-World Relationships
Five years ago, I launched Engage Spaces, largely because I sensed the existing tech strategy wasn’t oriented around enabling real-world relationships to flourish. What if technology could actually enable communities to flourish? That meant rethinking everything from the software itself to the way we fund and develop software.
Because my life is saturated with the pursuit of disciple-making, proximity, and intentional missional decisions, our software naturally reflected those values. This came as somewhat of a surprise, because we didn’t set out to do that, but upon some deep reflection, the parallels are obvious.
Engage Spaces is a digital home where communities can care for and love their people. At the core, that means moving software development from algorithm-driven to relationship-driven. Everything we do is designed to help relationships flourish.
Intentional proximity in a digital context enables real-world relationships to flourish by leveraging the normal rhythms of life to facilitate community, belonging and connectedness. Engage Spaces is basically the digital expression of those values.
Four Pillars of a Digital Home
I want to share how we’ve leveraged this technology to facilitate our real-world relationships at LIFT Church. There are four core pillars to how we think about this: Belong, Gather, Grow and Know.
Belong
At the core, this means enabling the work that is happening in our real-world relationships to be shared with others in our community despite geographic separation as we send farther and farther away.
We have dozens of “channels” to enable sharing, celebrating, praying and learning together. Everything from silly social channels to serious work conversations, deep theological conversations, and everything in between.
Sharing photos, not through algorithms but genuine social connection, allows us to be together, even as we send.
It also makes it much easier to work together, hop on a video call, or encourage one another.
Gather
Making it easy to bring the right people together. Communities are all about relationships, and those relationships are organized into a structure (Simple Churches in our case). Enabling people to engage with that structure, without even knowing it, is essential. This means registrations and events. Just as our church needs to make it easy to connect with the right people at the right time, our software home needs to accomplish the same goal.
Events and registrations should reflect and funnel into real-world relationships. We do just that.
Grow
Training can never be reduced to online modules. Real training is all about real-world relationships between a more experienced disciple and others. While there is value in asynchronous, independent learning, the best learning happens in community.
The training and equipping tools are all centered on real-world relationships. By leveraging video calling in our courses and linking coaches, instructors and students together in a relational web that reflects our actual relationships, the learning is much deeper than just completing modules.
We do this through dozens of courses that bring together a community of learning at every stage of the journey. Simple Church apprentices, campus pastors, missionaries, team leaders and so forth are all on their own dedicated learning pathways that help them flourish.
Know
One of the great challenges of leading a decentralized, relational community is having some awareness of what is going on in people’s lives and the movement as a whole as we spread out. There are a million “data” tools in the software industry. But data and analytics are not the point. If anything, data by itself is counterproductive. However, knowing, understanding and supporting our relationships is vitally important.
By using our automated surveying tools, we can genuinely listen to what is happening in the life of our movement. We can identify stories and difficult situations and surface them for prayer or celebration as needed. We can identify trends in real time and then discuss those trends with those whom they affect. In short: we can actually know our people and how their lives are integrating into the broader mission and community.
A Digital Home for Others
This is just a quick snapshot of how our ‘digital home’ enables our real-world relationships to flourish. But it really is the secret sauce that enables us to live and work together in community while moving fast to plant churches.
It’s been a wild journey. I started building Engage Spaces mostly because of an intuitive sense that we needed something better. But now, years later, I’m so grateful that we’ve persevered to build a platform and tool that is serving the mission at LIFT, and tens of thousands of people all around the world in other communities.