#1109 – AOL

Last month Verizon purchased AOL for $4.4 billion. This was news to me because I didn’t think AOL still existed. Little did I know that AOL still has 2.34 million subscribers as well as a highly successful digital advertising division. According to The Verge, Verizon is mostly interested in AOL’s digital advertising; Verizon hopes to utilize AOL’s advertising with its millions of subscribers.

It’s still really difficult for me to wrap my head around AOL as a viable company; I totally thought it had gone the way of MySpace. AOL is 30 years old, which pretty much makes it a dinosaur in the tech world. And I assume that most of its most faithful users are much older than 30 years old.

Apparently AOL has been able to navigate the changing digital landscape. And even though some of its users may still remember when mail was delivered by the Pony Express, it is still relevant. AOL is still a player because it has effectively changed with the times.

A lot of churches could learn from AOL’s example.

Obviously I don’t believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ has changed. The good news that God sent his Son to die for our sins and come back to life so that we might have new life, is the same today as it was 2,000 years ago. However, like AOL, the church and Christians need to be able to navigate a changing landscape. The world isn’t the same as it was 2,000 years ago; the world isn’t even the same as when AOL launched 30 years ago.

Even Jesus understood that how we communicate his good news was going to change.

In Matthew 9 Jesus says, “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

The new wine is the good news of Jesus Christ: we can be saved, transformed and part of Christ’s redemptive work in this world. That new wine couldn’t be communicated through the old religious system; it needed something new. So instead of relying on priests and scribes of the law to share his new message, Jesus turned to fishermen, tax collectors and zealots.

The good news is so good that we should employ any means necessary, short of sin, to communicate it.

For the early church that meant sharing the good news with Gentiles and not just Jews.

Later on that meant printing the Bible in common languages.

Musically that meant going from no instruments to organs to drums to MacBooks and turntables.

AOL has had to reinvent itself time and time again over the past three decades, changing its core business and how it communicates that business. As followers of Jesus we have had the same message for 2,000 years; we’ve just had to come up with different ways of communicating that message.

I’ve been a Christian for my entire life and have seen worship services and church strategies go through numerous changes. I’ve always embraced those changes, those new wineskins, as long as they were focused on bringing the new wine of Jesus’s gospel to as many people as possible.

And I certainly hope, as I get older, that I’ll still be as open to new and fresh ways to engage people who are far from God. I don’t want to be like an old AOL user, complaining about the new fangled “Gmails” and “YouTubes.”

As you’ve gotten older, what has helped you embrace new ways of communicating the gospel?