Brian McGuffin for IHUBApp Faith

Speakers: Brian McGuffin, Lead Pastor, Lakeshore St. Andrews Church

Brian McGuffin: Hi, my name is Brian McGuffin. I'm the lead pastor at Lakeshore St. Andrew's Church in Windsor, Ontario. Our passion is to help people receive and develop new life in Jesus Christ. We believe that true and lasting transformation can only happen through a personal relationship with our Savior and King, and so that's what motivates us day by day, month by month, year by year, to continue to do the work that God has called us to.

Brian McGuffin: We were facing a number of challenges as a congregation. 5 years ago when I first came to this church, the church had gone through a pretty big upheaval and a number of people left and finances changed, and then the pandemic hit, and while that really sent the congregation for a bit of a loop. And there was this sense of discontinuity. There was this sense of disconnection that we were really struggling with. We had some solutions, you know, we decided to go from two services down to one service that everybody could start getting to know each other. there was a number of turnovers that we faced, in staff, but a lot of volunteers stepped up. So we had some really positive things that were happening. In these in between times, but there was still a lack of connection, and that probably was the biggest, driver to looking for other tools that could help us, draw the church back together to get it on mission and to have that clear vision being promoted, in a way that people were digesting on a regular basis.

Brian McGuffin: We would often with the website, just have one person involved in curating information and adding stuff onto a calendar. But when it comes to the IHUBApp, we had multiple volunteers that were engaged with various channels that they were able to, take care of themselves, to add pictures on to, to add stories on to, and these would show up in people's feeds. So in their feed on their homepage when people. People came on, the nice thing was is that older people were seeing material that maybe young people had shared, or people that were, younger were sharing creative new things that they were doing or pictures from youth group, and it was all just there, just like you would have on a social media platform. But our social media platforms, we were finding that we had used. in other ways like Facebook and others like that. Um, they weren't necessarily friends in their own social media worlds, but when it came to the IHUBApp, something that our church uniquely ran, more people from different generations were interested in being involved with that, with that material and sharing with one another. So, a particular situation for us was, the starting to use it for obituaries. So again, we had a very disconnected congregation and then someone might pass away and nobody would even know that it had happened or the church wouldn't know. One of the things we've been able to do is post that obituary, and people from around the congregation could offer the care and support, that, that would normally have happened in a small church, back in the olden days, but now this is in the modern day in the contemporary world we live in. This was a way that that got shared and it allowed young people, middle-aged people, older people to communicate those kinds of things. And there was this concept of cross pollination a little bit as well. When you went to look at a ministry on the IHUBApp, say, men's ministry, because of the way the feeds work, you'd see other things that were also happening around the church or other people's events. One of the challenges we have in a church that is, not, uh, having a sense of community is this idea of silos, that we get these silos in our ministries. The IHUBApp encourages people to know what's going on in other people's, areas in other people's ministries, even for the ministry leaders themselves who are on that and looking at what's going on.

Brian McGuffin: What I would tell another ministry leader is that this isn't just another piece of technology that you add to an already overburdened technology budget or uh technology that you have in your church that is trying to make the technological experience better or different. This is really about helping the in-person experience be deeper and more meaningful. When people are able to, again, see various ways that they Church is operating the various ministries that are happening. They're able to see the pictures from the youth ministry. They're able to see what's happening at women's ministry. When they see engaging material that's happening on a regular basis, this draws them into the community so that when they see each other at church on a Sunday morning, even if they don't know each other, they feel connected because they've been watching the story, they've been learning about what's going on in people's lives. They've been making those connections. So I really believe that the IHUBApp is an important and I would say even integral part of our in-person experience.

Brian McGuffin: So the three words, or maybe better yet, 3 phrases that I would use to describe the IHUBApp are a crossover connection, that ability for the app to allow people to see what's going on in the life of the church as a whole, being not just given information, but being inspired. The second one would be multigenerational. There's a lot of people that are coming from different stages in life that really may only have unique interests, but also might want to know more about what's going on in some of the other areas of the church, and that's one of the real benefits. And the third would be engagement. You're encouraging people to not only take in information, but encouraging them to join in the conversation. And to be an active participant, whether it's through as a volunteer, kind of helping lead one of the channels, or it's just somebody that wants to put a heart or a thumbs up or whatever it is, to encourage, the people in your congregation.