The City’s Big Launch

Though the Alpha sticker is still on The City, it is really close to coming off. We’ve passed some major milestones, launched some really exciting new features, and successfully enabled the church-wide Call to Mission efforts. Praise Jesus, it has been a really exciting time seeing The City grow up so quickly and see it become part of the DNA of what Jesus is doing here at Mars Hill.

More than 3000 people have joined the City in the last month, mostly through the Kiosks setup at each campus. As we value real physical community, we wanted to make sure that everyone on The City has actually been through the doors of the campuses…hence no online signup.

We also wanted to do away with the typical “online discussion forum” as that is just another way to avoid real community and replace it with a virtual surrogate; by doing so, we’re seeing the level of communication skyrocket compared to the levels on our old member-only large-forum site. Having right-sized groups that mirror the real-world counterpart, has driven the stickiness of The City (how frequently visitors come back) to low days of 50% and high days of 75%. That’s three quarters of the people staying in touch with their communities on a daily basis…it’s incredible!

We are very excited about this, as it’s real relationships deepening through reinforcing actual community. It’s technology serving the mission, not being a mission to itself, and that’s something I’m very passionate about.

As far as the road ahead, we’re full of ideas. We still have several hundred things we’re working on, some of which are minor, but some are gargantuan possibilities for this framework. So stay tuned!