At the same time that I am looking at churches that have yet to set up a basic website, I am also keeping my eye on the way in which we are trying to catch up with mobile technology.

Check out this post from Marketing Pilgrim:

Mobile helps boost Christmas Day sales by 8.3 percent.

If you live in the church world, you may be wondering why this is helpful news. Shouldn’t people be celebrating the birth of Christ on Christmas day instead of shopping? Well, you may have a point there. However, the piece shows some interesting statistics about how people are quickly moving from roaming the web on their desktops and laptops to their mobile devices.

Here are some of those stats, thanks to Cynthia Boris at Marketing Pilgrim:

• More than 50% of online traffic on Christmas Day came from mobile, that’s an increase of 18.6% YoY.
• Mobile also accounted for 34.8% of online sales on December 25th. That’s up 20.4% over 2013.
• 40% of mobile traffic came from smartphones, but tablet users did more shopping. (18.4% vs 16.3)

So why does this matter to the church? We know that people shop for churches the way the shop for electronics – online. And, there is something more important than that: people shop for meaning online. Are we where the people are? John Wesley went to where the people were whether that be the mines, the fields or the pubs. I have to wonder if he would be sending itinerant preachers into the world of mobile technology.