Our “Click-and-Mortar” World
Photo by Vojtech Okenka (Pexels)
A recent intelligence study by PYMNTS, “ConnectedEconomy Monthly Report: The Urban-Rural Health Divide Edition,” surveyed nearly 2,500 U.S. consumers about how they “engage with digital technologies in various aspects of their lives.” It found that “among younger generations, most consumers prefer to make grocery purchases across both digital and physical channels, making them ‘Click-and-Mortar’ shoppers.”
And by most, they really do mean most.
The study found that “78% of millennials, 76% of bridge millennials and 73% of Gen Z shoppers buy groceries across both digital and physical channels.” Compare this to only 21% of baby boomers and seniors.
This is a true generational shift in behavior and, as the report concluded, shows that “retailers need to adapt to the growing preference for hybrid shopping models among younger consumers.”
It’s not just a wake-up call to retailers.
As I wrote in Hybrid Church, this is the new reality facing churches as well:
We must rethink the church’s approach to fulfilling its mission in a post-Christian, digital age. That rethinking hinges on a single word: hybrid. The church must bring together the physical and the digital….
Let’s do away with the glib remarks that you can’t do church digitally. The goal is not to transform the church into a solely digital form but to transform the church’s thinking and methods and strategies in order to reach a post-Christian world. Accomplishing this goal will necessarily include taking full advantage of the digital revolution. We must embrace a hybrid model of ministry that involves the digital and the physical because that is the reality of our world….
This hybrid model is the model all churches must embrace. Let’s not have cyber wars the way we have had worship wars. It’s not about whether churches should be in person or online; they should be both.
In the book, I wrote of the old analogy of the “frog in the kettle”—the idea that if you place a frog in a pot of water and slowly warm the temperature of the water to a boiling point, the frog won’t notice the gradual nature of the temperature change until it’s too late; it will be dead before it knows to jump out. The illustration was often used as a way of getting churches to wake up to the slowly warming waters of change before it was too late.
Our situation is more akin to a frog in a microwave. We’re not easing into this. There has not been a gradual change. It’s been sudden and abrupt, which means we have to adapt, and we have to adapt quickly.
That means going hybrid. Churches must explore what it means to simultaneously have a physical and digital presence.
It is, after all, a “click-and-mortar” world. Let’s use clicks, along with our bricks, to reach it.
James Emery White
Sources
“Three-Quarters of Young Consumers Favor Click-and-Mortar Grocery Shopping,” PYMNTS, May 17, 2024, read online.
James Emery White, Hybrid Church (Zondervan), order from Amazon.