Read Scott

First Christian Church of Captcha [A Warning]

Welcome. I write for church leaders on topics like strategy and communication. Since this is your first visit, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feed.

According to Wikipedia (my go-to encyclopedia), captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine that the user is not run by a computer. The purpose of captcha is to stop unwanted visitors to your site from participating in your site’s community (aka spam). You’ll mainly find it when trying to comment on a blog that isn’t running a plugin like Akismet that automatically blocks comments left by spam bots.

In your church, you’ll find captcha in noticeably different areas, but it all ends up with the same result; stopping people from participating in your church’s fellowship. Some of your church’s captcha is active and some is passive, but all accomplish the same unintended and exclusionary purpose. Let’s jump in.

Connection Cards

Michael Lukaszewski wrote a post about this factor that he found was captcha in his church. His solution, although incomplete in my opinion, is a step in the right direction. Connection cards, our first discovery of who visitors are, can be a form of captcha simply because we ask for too much information. We live in a skeptical, junk-mail ridden culture. Asking for more information than people want to give can stop many people from filling out the card at all and that’s a barrier.

Info-Smog

I heard this phrase when listening to a church consultant talk about what our church’s Sunday morning information sources look like. We commit the sin of TMI (too much information). We’re now trying to refocus our communication process by classifying information in categories of necessity.

Dress Code

A dress code can be formal, business casual, or a certain level of coolness. In any case, whether spoken or unspoken, a certain kind of attire is captcha of the worst kind. The problem with dress code is that it establishes that your church places conformity to a cultural ideal over transformation. Yikes.

Inside Jokes

Inside jokes aren’t just the jokes you tell from the stage that only the patriarch understands, although that’s a big no-no. These inside jokes apply to a lack of signs (only insiders know where the sanctuary is), locked entrances (only insiders know how to get in), bad parking (only insiders know that you should get there before 9:00 am to get the good spots), etc.

I’m sure there’s more, but I don’t really have the time to give you an exhaustive list of what every church uses for captcha in their churches. Honestly, you should take a step back and evaluate what your church uses as captcha and they don’t even know it.

The reality of the matter is this, the only captcha that exists in our churches should succeed in keeping selfishness from hindering a vision to change lives. As they say in the South, “That’ll preach!”

6 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Enable CommentLuv v1.3 which will try and parse your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you