Connecting with the Christ Church Community

Christ Church Madison is blessed with a beautiful community culture. Members of our congregation are genuine, hospitable, and interested in sharing life together. That is a treasure we want to steward well as our church grows. We are conscious that the size of the church affects community dynamics, and we want to stay ahead of any adjustments we should be making for the sake of the health of the community God has brought together here.

We started an all-church group chat in 2020, when COVID kept us from gathering in person, and we wanted some way to exchange the Peace with one another during the service livestream. It grew into a way to share what was going on in our lives, to ask for prayer, and to invite people to events during the week. Over the years, we have used different tools for this (GroupMe, Slack, an app through Subsplash, and now Church Center), and more and more people have joined.

In the time we’ve had an all-church chat, we have grown from an average Sunday attendance of 120 to 270, and the percentage of adults using the chat has also increased (see the graph). We are growing as a community, and the desire to connect with one another has not waned, but we must reckon with the fact that the digital tools that served us well five years ago are getting a little unwieldy at our current size.

The purpose of any digital communication tool at Christ Church is to facilitate embodied, personal, face-to-face interactions. It is not possible to have relationships with 270 people in an all-church chat like it was when there were 50 or even 100 users. In order to make room for newcomers, and encourage face-to-face communication, we will be shifting our chat strategy. Many of our all-church groups and chats will be deactivated in the coming weeks as we pursue a more streamlined app approach (see below how our app is being simplified). At the same time, we want to encourage other ways of connecting and building community. The ideas that follow are certainly not exhaustive – we encourage you to get creative, too – but we hope they are a helpful starting point.

Our Soup & Bread groups are already places where embodied community happens, and this is where we want to redirect most of our “all-church chat” energy. Our S&B groups are all set up in Church Center, and we encourage you to use the chat feature within those groups to stay in touch. Be yourself – share that picture of your cat lounging in the sun, or the goofy vanity plate you saw on the beltline. Hosting a game night? Invite your small group! Need prayer for a family member? Let your group join you in prayer.

Did you know there are groups in Church Center for creativity, getting outside, and sports? If you’d like to share encouragement and ideas for projects, or (even better) meet up to go for a hike or watch a game together, these are the places to connect with like-minded folks. Our goal is for these chats to be focused on facilitating meetups, rather than a place for long conversation threads.

You’ve shared, and we hear you – the Marketplace is hugely helpful! We will keep the Marketplace in the Community Life group for now, with new parameters around posting. When sharing something, please include a phone number or email address for people to contact you for follow-up. We don’t want to flood the chat with exchange logistics; those should happen directly between the two involved parties. Hopefully, that will keep the chat tidy and save everyone from a flood of notifications.

These two all-church groups were the subject of particular prayer and discernment among our staff team. We’ve decided to make the one called Church Life more of an announcement-style group, where only staff will be posting.
The Community Life group will also have a staff-only announcement channel, where we can post things you would like to share with the church, including events you’re involved in outside of Christ Church. You may submit requests to me (Dcn. Kaitlyn), and we will share at our discretion. This is also where we will post birth announcements and meal train links.

We would like to help facilitate offline connections as much as possible, especially in two areas: prayer and discussing the Lectionary. Those are among the chats that will be deactivated.
Instead of sharing your prayer request in an all-church chat, we’d encourage you to share with your Soup & Bread group, or go get prayer on a Sunday morning. We’re also working on a pathway for more in-person prayer opportunities. For now, if you’d like to pray with someone from the church, you can reach out to me (Dcn. Kaitlyn) and I’ll help connect you with a member of staff or a prayer minister who can pray with you.
We’d also like to continue to encourage following the Lectionary together and talking about it. Rather than having a chat for that, we’d encourage you to find 2-3 people to meet with regularly and read the Bible together. If you’re having a hard time finding those folks, you can reach out to Daniel, our Pastoral Resident. We will do our best to connect you with others in the same boat.

To help facilitate those in person connections, we encourage you to use the Directory to reach out to folks by phone or email. If you do not currently have access to it, you can request it here, and if you have questions about how to set up your profile, check out these instructions. We strongly encourage you to add a photo – this will really help everyone learn each other’s names.

Change can be hard, and we want you to know we as a staff have approached this change with a lot of care. We have received feedback from many of you, both expressing a desire to keep things as they have been, and some annoyance with what the app has become (a deluge of too much information and overwhelming notifications.) Our goal as a church community is to have healthy, embodied relationships, and to use the resources at our disposal wisely to that end. We hope there will be more coffee dates, play dates, and game nights, more person-to-person introductions facilitating connections for newcomers, and deeper relationships rather than anxiety about (not) knowing everyone in our growing congregation.

And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. [Acts 2:42-47]

By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. [John 13:35]