This is Daren Wride and welcome to Priority Pastor.
How often do you hear an idea that just kinda roots in your head it’s like a little thought bomb that changes your thinking or shifts your thinking in some small, but permanent way.
I had one of those moments a while ago and I came across a fella who was explaining the difference between being a consumer or a producer online.
And this is kind of what he was talking about. He said basically, if you look at the online world (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and everything else) there’s really two kinds of people involved. There are producers, the people producing the content, and there are the consumers, those who are watching the content and sometimes putting in a lot of time watching and consuming the content.
But he pointed out how high level marketers, these big personalities, these celebrities, they may have a lot of content on those on those media through Facebook, etc because they’re producers, but they’re not consuming a whole lot. They’re producing the content.
And what this fella did was he took he took this idea and rolled it into his children’s lives and explained this concept to them and decided they were going to have a screen free summer. There’s gonna be no computer screens, no iPods, that kind of stuff for the summer except for the purpose of producing.
And had to explain to the kids exactly what that meant. And what they decided to do as a family was start a YouTube channel and each of the children could have their own playlists where they could produce content tied to whatever they like. For instance the one daughter was gonna do a playlist about crafts and one might do another channel about some other hobby and produce content for that through the summer.
Now interestingly, they could go and watch videos and things online as a part of their research for producing that content, but only for the purpose of research. And the idea was to get them, you know, being creators instead of just blobs on the couch through the summer.
And of course this doesn’t just apply to YouTube and social media. It could apply to things like writing. You could encourage someone to write instead of reading for a while. You could encourage them to do something that maybe they could sell at a farmers market, if there’s a farmers market in your area.
And what’s interesting is when you think about it, online and in the world, in general producers are the ones who are making money and influencing people. They’re the ones who are influencing people. The consumers, the people who spend most of their time watching and listening to that content, they’re the ones who ultimately end up spending the money and getting influenced.
I kind of think this has some implications for ministry for evangelism for being salt and light and perfume in the world as followers of Jesus, as Christian leaders, we have to ask the question, am I a consumer or am I a producer?
Now think for a moment. What would happen if you took whatever your consumption time is, and let’s, you know, let’s make it fairly substantial. Let’s say we took all our consumption time, watching movies, time on Facebook, time on social media, time on YouTube, whatever that boils down. What if you cut that time, simply cut that time in half and used the freed up time to produce content tied to something you were interested in?
And what if then you even leverage some of that consumption time for research for whatever it is you wanted to talk about? In fact, this little episode is a bit of an example where I listen to a podcast that flag this idea and I’ve mulled on it. I had a note in my file for podcast. I’ve been mulling on it and thinking about it; now I’m sharing it with you in a different form than I heard it because it’s applied now to ministry.
So that’s that’s a challenge whether it’s summer or not to move the dial a bit to dial down the consumption dial up the production. There’s so many different ways to produce content. You can produce video content and what that does, it forces you learn how to produce video and you’ll learn something in the process.
You can produce audio content like a podcast, very simple to do. Very inexpensive and you can take a course, you can find instructional for free on how to do that. You’ve probably got something you want to talk about, at least you know 10 episodes or so you can you can do that. Or maybe writing. Maybe it’s time to take some of your spoken content, if you’re a preacher/teacher type and turn it into written form. Whether a blog, ultimately may be a book and begin producing that content.
It’s very interesting in the online marketing world that this whole idea is called publishing, you know producing content and getting out there and all these different ways, that producing content and publishing really is the foundation for so many online businesses. If you are producing content regularly, you can do so much with it.
For instance here’s this blog post was originally a podcast. I don’t do it with all of podcasts, but I try. I took this podcast, got it transcribed. You can get transcribed now for free online through A.I. You just upload the audio, and it spits out the written word. You need to make a few edits and you’ve got a manuscript, which you can take that manuscript turn it into a blog. You can post a link to the blog on your Facebook page or if you use Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever you can do that. You can take some quotes from your episode and turn it into a graphic and post that in Instagram and produce content and get people to come back and read your content or listen to your content. Very easy to do.
In fact, I would say most churches most pastors have a lot of content that they’re just not syndicating, not producing it in bite sized chunks and syndicating. You know a good sermon can probably be five or 10 or 20 different pieces of content in different forms and be used to influence people, to build up believers, to reach unbelievers, to be salt and light and an influence out there.
So think about how can you decrease your consumption, increase your production and ultimately increase your influence. Something to think about. Have an outstanding day press on.
