Church of England Digital Labs One-Day Sprint Experience

Kyle Kutter
Open Digerati
Published in
6 min readMar 2, 2018

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Tell me if you have heard this one before? A vicar, a developer, and a designer walk into a coffee shop…

It’s not a joke. This happened last week when 60+ people from the UK and around the world with different backgrounds and denominations showed up to Christ Church Spitalfields’ Hanbury Hall Cafe in East London.

It doesn’t sound like a place that would host a day dedicated to ideating, testing, and pitching digital ideas, but Hanbury Hall Cafe set the perfect stage for a productive, collaborative sprint day led by the Church of England (CofE) Digital Team.

“Church of England Digital Labs aims to gather together the many Christian coders, creatives and techies who have the skills and passion for using technology to aid the church.” — CofE Website

Terry Storch, Matt Sawmiller, and I, all from the Life.Church Digerati Team, were honored to be invited to be part of the mentor team for the historic launch of the first-ever Digital Labs event hosted by the Church of England. We set a course for London to bring our experiences, learnings, and perspective to the event and to learn all the new digital things God is doing in the global Church — we weren’t disappointed.

You may be asking yourself, what good could come from a group of strangers coming together in just one day. Good question! In just 12 hours together — united by a common mission, clarified goals, skills, experience and passion for leveraging technology to expand the Kingdom of God — we boiled down hundreds of ideas into seven digital solutions along with prototypes.

The sprint gives teams a shortcut to learning and launching.

We followed a compressed version of Google Venture’s Design Sprint, and God showed up big in the projects.

If you haven’t heard of GV’s Design Sprint model, check out these resources; “Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” or The Design Sprint — GV.

“Over the course of today, we’re going to try to and distill a couple of really great actionable ideas that are going to get funded both with money, resources and teams around them,” said James Poulter, who by day is the Head of Emerging Platforms & Partnerships for LEGO, but also serves on the Advisory Board for the CofE Digital Team.

During the #CofELabs event, we shortened the GV’s Design Sprint to one day and kept to these five steps:

Ideating, Maturing, Testing, Refining, and Presenting.

Ideating

First, each delegate threw ideas down on colored sticky notes. Second, the delegates went around the table briefly sharing each idea while the mentor grouped the ideas into buckets. Next, the mentor shared the high level idea categories with the whole room. Finally, the CofE team compiled all the categorized ideas and put them on the wall in preparation for the next phase.

Maturing

After a short #TeaTime, we all voted at the sticky notes wall by placing a star sticker on our two favorite ideas. The top seven ideas were placed on tables, and every delegate joined the idea they felt drawn to; then mentors were assigned to the groups. Groups began maturing their idea by tackling a couple prescribed methods. First, by answering “What problem are we trying to solve?” Second, “What do we want users to think, feel, and do?” Third, we mapped out the user journey with words or drawings. Last, we wrote a press release as if this feature, app, or digital technology were releasing to the public.

Testing

Each table then split up into two groups. Group A would stay at the table to pitch and test their ideas and theories with the goal of learning quickly from other users with fresh perspectives. Group B went to different tables to listen to the pitches of the other six ideas and then asked questions and gave feedback.

Refining

It’s awesome how a couple of rounds of testing and feedback can help a team make an idea even better. During the Refining phase our team unpacked the feedback we received during Testing and began editing our user journey, rewriting our press release, and tweaking our prototypes.

Presenting

In this final stage, we presented our final five-minute pitch, and the teams presented in a variety of ways. Since my team focused on serving the 29% of UK citizens who are limited in their ability to enter into a physical church building, we decided to record and edit a five-minute video talking through the problem and our findings, and then showing a prototype of our solution. Then, the judges followed up with five minutes of questions.

“We really want people to think about solutions that bring people into the church and also help to grow people’s faith.”Adrian Harris, Head of Digital for the CofE

So on a bitter cold (but sunny) day in London with 60+ delegates from around the world being open with their ideas and willing learn from each other, the CofE accomplished their goal and presented seven digital solutions to opportunities in the global Church. It took a lot of hard work and fast-paced decision-making from the groups as we ran through GV’s Design Sprint model in just one day. As promised, after hearing the seven presentations, the CofE and its panel of judges selected 2 winners and are now actively resourcing those two digital solutions.

When was the last time you dedicated some time and space to solving problems or creating opportunities?

Could this sprint model work for your teams to quickly ideate and learn before making expensive commitments to solutions you think will work?

Those are the questions we as the Life.Church Digerati Team are asking right now. How could we invite our church community in with their passions and skills to use digital technology to help solve known or unknown problems in the Church? As we strive to be more open with our code and technology, how can we also be open with our ideas and collaboration?

Flashback

This 500+ year old Anglican community serves it’s 25 million members in UK through 16,500 churches and 42 cathedrals. I remember experiencing it for the first time in the Summer of 2003 while studying abroad in London through my alma mater, Belmont University. One Sunday a group of us students went to worship at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a beautiful experience both physically and spiritually, and I distinctly remember the sounds of the room during worship and the unity I felt while taking communion with the rest of the congregation. Funny side note…I did not expect the communion to use real wine so I was a surprised when I felt a little burn down my throat after this holy moment. Now, some 14+ years later it was an amazing honor to be back in another historic Anglican church as a mentor for the first ever Church of England Digital Labs representing my church Life.Church, and the Open Digerati movement.

Me during the Summer of 2003 while studying in London.

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Husband, Dad, and Pastor at #LifeChurch. Leveraging technology to reach people for Jesus. #opendigerati