How To Do A Live Q & A Service In Your Church

This past weekend we did an anonymous and live Q & A service at our church, and I wanted to report on some of the details in case you ever wanted to try it out for yourself.

To give you some background, we were on the tail end of a series  we do every year where we give the congregation an opportunity to submit different Bible related questions and then we bundle them in one series. We called it “Study Hall” and ended up covering such hot topics as divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and others. For the final day of the series we planned on doing a live q & a service where people could anonymously submit questions to a moderator and I’d attempt to answer them live and unrehearsed.

So here’s a few things to think about….

1. Have a panel to back you up. I had a two person panel. On person had a lot of training and knowledge on science/evolution kind of issues. Another guy had a lot of general Bible knowledge. And we then had a moderator that would receive the questions and then feed them to me.

2. Set up a system to receive questions anonymously. This is really the heart and center of this whole deal. People won’t feel free to submit questions if they have to reveal who they actually are. So I wanted to make sure we got this part right. (Thanks to Randy Magray for helping me think through some of these options) There’s actually several options that could be used:

• Poll Everywhere. In this post I wrote about my experience in using Poll Everywhere in a church service. This is a service where people could participate in polling anonymously and via text messages. They have an option where people can actually submit questions. This would be a great option, but it costs money. If money is no issue for you, then you might want to check it out.
• Buying a new cell phone for that one use. You could a buy a cheap cell phone that you put minutes on and use that for that purpose. It wouldn’t have anyone’s contacts in it so that would also ensure anonymity.
• Using Google Voice. This was the clear winner and is what we ended up using. I had Google Voice set up on my cell phone, and gave out that number so people could text in to that number. It didn’t have any contacts associated with it, so everything was totally anonymous. Let me tell you, I thought it worked perfectly. The moderator had the cell phone. A few hours before the service we put the number on our church’s Twitter and Facebook page, and sure enough, we started to receive questions. As the service started and we announced it more, our moderator began to receive quite a bit more. So it was as simple as opening up a text message on an iPhone. He could see the list of questions and simply select which one he wanted to feed to me. Later that afternoon, I logged into my Google Voice account, and I could see all the questions that were submitted. Replying to a text message on Google Voice is as easy as replying to an email message, so I took a few moments to thank each person for submitting the question.

**We also gave people the opportunity to write questions down on a piece of paper and turn them in on that day.

3. Set some ground rules for the congregation and panelists. At the beginning of the service I first set some ground rules for the congregation. I told them that this wasn’t the time to play “stump the pastor.” This wasn’t the time to play “Bible Bowl” and ask some weird arcane type of question. I admitted that it would be quite easy to stump me if they really wanted to. But that we wanted to receive real questions that people are struggling with. This helped to ensure that we wouldn’t have to sift through “fake” or unrealistic questions.

So how did things go? I thought they went wonderfully. There was definitely a sense of excitement in the air. It was fun receiving the questions and attempting to answer them. As we continued in the service, I noticed that some on the panel felt that they had to comment on almost every question. Because of this it slowed us down, and we weren’t able to cover as many questions as I had hoped. We’re going to continue the Q & A service for one more week because there was such good response. I made sure to connect with the panel, though, and let them know that for next time, to only jump in if I call on them for help with a question. I think this will help to ensure that we can cover many more questions.

So those are some of the major details concerning how to do an anonymous Q & A service. Thanks to Google Voice, all the setup was supremely easy.

Have you ever done one of these before? If not, do you think you’d ever give it a try? Do you have any other ideas for how to receive questions anonymously?

[image by Eleaf]

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2. Having a Church Service at the Mall
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