Don’t Use the Pony Express to Mail Your Prayer Letter

Communication has changed dras­ti­cally. The thought of a horse and rider deliv­er­ing my per­sonal mes­sages seems like a thing of the ancient past, but in real­ity, it was only 150 years ago that peo­ple in the Wild West were using the Pony Express. I have to admit, the Pony Express sounds roman­tic, but I’m very glad to have Google Chat instead (one sec­ond vs. ten days). This is a per­fect exam­ple, albeit an extreme one, of just how dra­mat­i­cally things have shifted in a rel­a­tively short amount of time. The whirl­wind of tech­no­log­i­cal changes has left peo­ple, espe­cially those in min­istry, scram­bling to keep up.

One of my main goals at WIM is to edu­cate our mis­sion­ar­ies on how to effec­tively engage their net­work of sup­port­ers. With all the cur­rent options such as social media, email, Skype, etc., every­one seems to be ask­ing the same burn­ing ques­tion: “Is tra­di­tional mail dead?” Some peo­ple (try­ing to sound edgy, I think), talk about snail mail as if it were as obso­lete as the Pony Express. I have some news for you, peo­ple: snail mail is alive and well!  People are over-stimulated with the hun­dreds of texts, sta­tus updates, chat mes­sages and emails that bom­bard them every­day. If you are pre­pared to com­pete with that, be my guest, but you’d bet­ter make your e-communications excep­tional if you want peo­ple to see them, let alone read them. Because of this, I believe that there is still a strate­gic place for the tan­gi­ble, paper newslet­ter (check out this eye-opening arti­cle). While you’re at it, you might as well make it excep­tional, too.

Now that I’ve (hope­fully) con­vinced you not to aban­don snail mail alto­gether, let me say that the true sweet spot might be found in com­bin­ing the best of both worlds. As this arti­cle sug­gests, you don’t want to write prayer let­ters as if tech­nol­ogy didn’t exist. Then you would just seem, well, igno­rant. In the future I plan to write a post with cre­ative ideas for multi-channel com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

While we are grate­ful for tech­nol­ogy, it’s not with­out chal­lenges for mis­sion­ar­ies. It can be over­whelm­ing. How do you keep it all bal­anced and stay con­nected with every­one? Please com­ment.

Father, some­times mis­sion­ar­ies feel over­whelmed by all the options they have for how to spend time, keep in touch with peo­ple, and min­is­ter well in their fields of ser­vice. They des­per­ately need your Holy Spirit to guide them moment-by-moment and show them how to strate­gi­cally and cre­atively use the tools you’ve given them to stay con­nected.