Greetings Mike,
We had a discussion section on this topic at our last missions meeting, it's come up in one of the recent threads here too. Many of our affiliated ministers particularly in Europe based missions seem to be using android apps to help coordinate and assist their missions plans but sounds like most of them will be available on multiple platforms. So, that should hopefully not be much issue. Maybe unsurprisingly the mission families kids have often been the first ones to find these options and several of the churches over there have tried them out.
I was at that particular discussion section for only a portion so I didn't get all the details, a lot of it was remote meeting with the families now overseas esp in Europe. But I got the sense many of the apps are denomination specific, ex. Digital Missionary but there have been some efforts to develop apps of more general use. Allowing for ex. easy preparation and translation of sermons and NT verses, of particular use for our teams settled in Europe. One of the ministers in France said the LDS families who've moved to Europe like to use My Mission to coordinate, again this one seems to be specific for LDS but they may soon have a more general version available. Mission Prayers had been a fairly popular one as of early last year I believe, not sure how often it's being used right now.
Generally speaking like in last thread on this, the most important app right now for outreach and recruiting with missions in general seems to be Tiktok, it's simply where the flock is most readily reached and where easily distilled messages on everything from chapters and verses, to tips on good family life, church meetings and activities draw in members, and the most successful missions and new churches have gotten proficient in it. By latest stats literally about half the world uses it frequently now and Tiktok is very popular not just in North America but also in Europe, so recruiting esp of young families has been greatly helped by putting up short videos of church activities, things like Bible quizzes and fun ways of teaching Sunday School lessons in the local languages.
One of the reasons the Church has reached so many souls and communities over the centuries is our missions have been practical adopters of the latest good technology for communications each time, irregardless of how the tech started. As example when Gutenberg first invented the printing press in Germany, even though he himself first used it to print Bibles it was mainly at first used for crass ads for local shops and political posters and looked down upon. But ministers at the time saw it’s potential and adopted it quickly, for ex. both the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation took off because ministers at the time were among the first to understand how important the printing press would become. Today is no different, it’s just a matter of reaching out to people where they are. One of our inter-church committee members who works as an engineer said it’s something about “affinity groups” I think the term is, whatever Tiktok uses in the algorithm it’s good at getting your message in front of the people are receptive to it. So it’s just as useful for outreach for missions to build and reach out to our flock as it is for our kids to share cute dancing or cooking videos, but much more important and rich in impact across communities.
