Synchronous and Asynchronous Relationship Building

John Yoder: This summer, Leighton Seys of www.thechurch.digital is walking a group of multiethnic young adults in the Minneapolis area through the process of launching online small groups. This blog is Part 4 of 8 of the training our members receive. We plan to go public with online small groups this fall. Through this series, you might find fresh ideas for online ministry.

Leighton Seys: In this lesson, we’re going to be talking about synchronous versus asynchronous communications.

These two concepts may be new to you. Synchronous is where everyone is present at the same time. Asynchronous is when people are engaged whenever they are available.

Participants want to engage when they’re most productive. If you have a global audience, you want to respect everyone’s time zone. You want their responses to be thoughtful, but not necessarily immediate.

Synchronous is what happens at a sporting event. It has high-intensity connection at a fixed time. It’s best for people coming together, brainstorming, conflict resolution, celebration. It requires everybody to be present at the same time.

Asynchronous is more like a bus station or a train station, a place where people come and go continuously throughout the day. It’s a continuous flow of individuals on their own schedules. It’s best for deep work, status updates, global inclusion, and it provides time for thoughtful, measured responses.

We need to think carefully about building this online community. We should not think about creating multiple channels of everything we can think of, because that just creates bloat. It creates a ghost town effect.

When new people show up, and they see that nobody’s chatted in half of the channels, they’re not inclined to spend any time on your platform. They see it as unused and unproductive. Either it feels like there are too many things and it’s overwhelming, or it feels like nothing is happening here.

It’s like a mall that is way too big for its few remaining stores. I have that right down the street from me, an old mall that used to be full, and now half of the stores are closed. I don’t go there often. The same is true as you’re coming into a digital space, you don’t want to dilute it by having too many things.

You can always go back and add things gradually. You can go back to your channels to see which ones have been active, and had a lot of engagement. Maybe some just need to be hidden and brought back around at a different time of the year. For instance, if it’s a Christmas channel, we could hide it and bring it back next Christmas. If it’s a sporting channel, we could do the same.

Some channels might run their course. Somebody was active in there initiating it, and then they suddenly no longer have the time or energy, and so that channel might need to be hidden or archived or entirely deleted.

So we want quality over quantity. Five channels where people are engaging are better than fifty channels where nobody is there. We want to scale gradually. We want to grow our channels as the community grows.

We also want small inputs and big outputs. We want low barriers for people to be able to engage. So some of the engagement that we want are just emoji replies. If we have a channel that’s posting pictures of stuff, emojis are all that we need. Now, in a prayer channel, yes, emojis can signify right now that I saw your prayer request, and I put a prayer hand there to tell you I’m praying, but when I have time, I might come back and write a thoughtful response and or a prayer to what you have shared.

So we want things that can have that immediate engagement. So if you’ll notice, one of the things I posted in the channel recently was, “Hey, what sport are you watching right now? Is it soccer? Is it basketball? Is it hockey?” And then put the emojis there. All you need to do is go click on the one that you already are watching and say, “Yes, thumbs up on that one. That’s the one I’m watching.”

Somebody might come along and say, “Hey, you only gave us three choices. I’m actually watching something else.” They can add their own emoji there.

So create things that people can answer within 30 seconds. They can answer just as they’re going along. You want a mixture of those, and you want some with more in-depth questions. We want a mixture of things that will get engagement right away and things that people can come to and give thought later on and be able to fully dive deeper into. You only open a new channel when people are active and ready to engage.

Now I want us to think about a rhythm. Each church is going to be different in their rhythm of what’s going on. Some churches are going to have a different rhythm based on the time of their worship service. Not every church is able to have their worship time on Sunday morning. Some will have theirs on Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, maybe Saturday or even Friday.

We also have different rhythms in our weekly activities. We could have various different things in our channel to remind us of what’s happening. So maybe Monday might be about the weekend wins, the positive things that happened over the weekend for you or within the church community.

Maybe you want a midweek wall where you ask, how are you doing? Let’s do a check-in. Let’s have prayer happening in the middle of the week to make sure that we’re not missing anybody. So come up with a rhythm of each day of the week.

I have a friend who’s a Twitch streamer who does Weird Wednesdays. He finds weird things on the internet, and he talks about them. It doesn’t have to be all about ministry. It can be about life. It can be about other things. So brainstorm with your group about seven different engagements that you can have throughout the week.

Now, you also might decide you don’t want one every day. But you can come up with rhythms that make sense. Maybe you’ll do Monday, Tuesday, take a break, then do Thursday, Friday, and then we’ll leave the weekends open. Or you might do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, so that you are engaging every other day.

But what is it that you can ask? What is it you can post? What are the rhythms that you can have? And these can change over time. They can grow over time. We just want to get a couple of those ideas out there so we can begin implementing them.

John Yoder: Next time Leighton will discuss building openness in online communities.