When I was first starting out as a creative director in the corporate world, I was really competitive. I spent a good portion of my time sizing up our competition, identifying what I though were their design weaknesses and then creating plans to surpass them.
This competition was my daily fuel. That was until my mentor sat me down, and gave me this one piece of advice.
Your only competition is yourself. You need treat this like a game of golf. You’re the only one keeping score, and your goal is to get a little bit better each day. Stop comparing yourself to those around you.
To this day, those worlds still ring true to me and I’ve learned to apply them not only to myself, but my church’s social media as well.
This is hard to do, because of the things that the world does is tell you that you’re not complete, and your effort is not enough. In fact, I’ve become more resolute to the idea that the world’s ultimate goal is to rob you of contentment. More specifically, contentment in Christ.
That’s why it’s difficult to not want to compare your church’s social media with the church down the street or even across the globe. Yes, their graphics look cooler, they have more “Likes”, and everyone in their photos looks like a model from an H&M ad.
But that’s what the world does. It sows little seeds of doubt and discontentment in our hearts, and before you know it we trying to be something that we’re not. We end up with angry and fustrated that our attempts to be cool or relevant haven’t connected with our audience.
When I have those moments, I have to remind myself that my soul will never be satisfied by being cooler than the church down the street. My contentment will be in being who God created me to be, and my church doing the same.
Will I push my church to get better? You bet. But I’ll do that in context of knowing who we are and what were designed to do. I’ll focus on helping us get a little bit better every single day. Knowing that my goal isn’t to be better than the church down the street, but be better for our audience and those who were trying to reach.