Continuing The iChurch Method TV series, here's the transcript from the video above.
The first ministry that gave me the opportunity to work with them was Crenshaw Christian Center out in Los Angeles. When I got there in 2007 they were utilizing technology as best they could. The people they had on staff were working on some great technological things but they just didn’t know how to utilize the internet as best as it could be used at the time.
What I was able to do was come in and look at what they had going on and start looking at how they could do it better. Coming to a large ministry—from the outside looking in— you think that they know everything; they have everything going on. What I was able to see was how I was able to utilize my skill set and actually make an impact instead of just coming in and being a cog in the wheel.
With that ministry I was able to start working on developing solutions for their websites and multimedia, eCommerce, social media, and stuff like that, and see how it actually transformed the ministry because it was able to bring those aspects to the ministry in a way that they weren’t using them before.
Likewise, when I was working with TD Jakes Ministries and went out there—even starting back to when I came in for the interview—they asked me what I could bring to the ministry. I gave them five areas; I said, “I can help you out with your websites, multimedia, eCommerce, social media, and mobile.” Subsequently those five topics became the chapters in the book I wrote, The iChurch Method.
What really helped me out with these ministries is seeing the things that I was bringing to the ministry, actually seeing the impact of them and how people were able to interact more with the ministry via technology. But, I also see that even as large as these ministries were and the great impact that they already had from me watching them from afar all these years, I saw that something that God put in me was actually able to help them at a time such as now.
It was two-fold. First let’s go back to Crenshaw Christian Center. Starting with them I was a one-man department. Basically I was hired to revamp the entire web presence. Everything that was going on on the internet that you see such as the social media aspect of it, the mobile, the website, I was a one-man department. I had a graphic person that worked with me but any internet solutions, whatever I came up with, was the solution they went with.
I worked very closely with the pastor. He was a young guy like myself, early 30s, so we had a good idea what we wanted to do in terms of technology and he would give me his ideas and I would make them happen in terms of technology.
On the other side of that, with T.D. Jakes Ministries, it was a much larger environment. I was a part of a team. I came in and initially they wanted me to work specifically just on websites but then when I started telling them the other expertise that I had, which was the eCommerce, the multimedia, and stuff like that, I started to expand to other teams. Initially I came in working with online marketing and that was initially what they thought I could do. Then I kind of became a hybrid of working with IT because of the actual programming stuff that I knew how to do as well.
The real kind of pivot came when social media really took off on the scene. TD Jakes Ministries, when I got there, they weren’t really using social media in that manner and this is 2010. So, when I started showing them some solutions and developing some strategies for them to help utilize social media on a whole other level—mainly Facebook and Twitter at that time—then they really let me just go ahead and run with it. Basically kind of probably to keep me quiet.
But, the thing that happened that was phenomenal was social media took off; it exploded. When I got there they probably had 2000 people just off of the name of the pastor, Bishop Jakes. Within two years we increased that to a million.