As churches begin to use facial recognition software to track attendance, what’s next for personalized worship experiences?
The 21st Century Attendance Pad
Engadget doesn’t usually have religious content on their technology website, but recently they featured a facial recognition software that is used at multiple (!!) churches in order to track attendees without forcing them to fill out attendance pads or communication cards. From the article:
More than two dozen churches around the world have installed a facial-recognition system that monitors which members of the flock have actually shown up for the Sunday sermon. The system is called Churchix and was developed by Israeli software company, Face-six. It continually scans the religious center’s CCTV feed and matches congregation members to a pre-existing database of their faces — reportedly with 99 percent accuracy.
So how does the visitor or member get their face in the database? From a churchm.ag interview:
We encourage churches to set up Churchix in a registration checkpoint where members are voluntary registering themselves by just looking at a camera. The church can offer members different incentives that will happily make them look at the camera.
Offer incentives…or according to their website, they can upload pre-existing photo albums. Wow.
At least 30 churches in three countries are now using this software–though it is unclear if their congregations know about it. Creeptastic…
…or is it? Churches already track attendance and manually enter such data as in the image above. What Churchix does is just digitize and automate the same process that the ushers do when they take attendance.
Beyond attendance
But let’s imagine that this technology becomes used more than facial recognition to customization of the worship experience.
I’m reminded of Tom Cruise’s 2002 movie The Minority Report where the advertisement screen scans your retinas as you walk by and they customize their ads to your interests. As facial recognition software identifies people and can track where they are sitting in the worship hall, worship leaders can tailor the worship experience in little ways to connect with congregants.
Imagine attending a worship service for a second time (or perhaps another congregation that shares Churchix data) and the church is able to offer you a customized experience based on your previous encounters.
- Ushers can get a ping to guide you to sit in an area of the worship space where you are closer to people of your similar demographic or family structure…or at least away from the creepers.
- If the church knows you gave online or will give using the app, ushers will receive a ping to not bother you with the offering plate so that others don’t give you the side-eye that you didn’t put anything in the plate.
- If the church knows you pull out your phone and play games during the sermon, a spotlight tracked to your seat will either render that behavior too-exposed…or at least flood the area with light so that the light from the phone doesn’t distract other parishioners.
- Easier to find you in the worship services so that ushers can pass notes about children in the childcare, vehicle lights left on, etc.
- The post-sermon analysis will give the pastor positives for laughter, negatives for bored/no reactions, and the pastor can tailor the sermons to the people who (a) give and (b) react in the majority.
The Future is Now, actually
Those comments aren’t far from reality–we certainly use personal customization in many areas of business and culture now. We customize Google and Facebook ads based on professed interests. We choose to watch only channels that reinforce our beliefs. Target knows you are pregnant before your parents do. Customization and tracking are increasing in all areas of culture–it’s only a matter of time before they are used in the worship space as well.
There’s incredible technological ability to create a personal touch to worship that people may find welcoming. And it’s essentially available now to megachurches willing to put in the money.
Even though a computer can recognize faces, it cannot recognize motives or needs. It cannot tell (yet) whether a person is angry at their spouse, doubting their faith, wrestling with addiction, or the “why” of the people in attendance. Perhaps in Black Mirror it might take place, but for the moment, only personal relationships can properly inform a church why their people are there–not just that they are.
A personal touch?
However, a truly personal touch cannot be replaced by a computer.
The most powerful image I’ve seen in the past week was this one (I can’t repost – click here to view) of an elderly usher with white gloves opening the door for a little girl coming up to attend Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, for the first Sunday after the terrorist attack.
The look from the gentleman’s eyes, welcoming the child in…no computer could ever be more personal than that. No amount of quantitative or qualitative data could replicate the look on the man’s eyes.
That’s all the personal touch we need.
While big data can help congregations, any one that relies on computer power rather than people power will become obsolete. May we embrace technology to assist churches with managing growth, but may we never lose the arms and eyes that are required to embrace in the first place.
Thoughts?
I don’t know it seems creepy to me. Big brother is now the Church?
Not nearly as creepy as a proposal over a decade ago by Bill Easum. People would be seated at waited tables in front of view screens to guide most of their worship experience. When it was time for the “sermon,” the pastor would move among the tables, stopping at each one, and based on inputs from a chip implanted in her brain, would deliver a brief message customized for the people at that table. As I read it, it seemed to me Easum was suggesting this non-ironically as a positive future of perfect customization and ultimate relevance– a goal toward which we should hope to move.
I am old…I admit it. I would walk out of any church when I found out that they were using such things. However, to be honest, I probably wouldn’t attend any church that was large enough to use them.
We have come to expect, anticipate, and many of us even accept, this kind of invasive technology in the name of sales, profit and income. Kroger grocery stores track every one of my purchases and mails coupons to me at home to get me back into the store. My cable provider monitors what I watch and customizes special offers to me to “enhance my viewing experience.” Facebook tracks all of my posts, including saving the ones I start to type but erase before posting. But my church? The Church? I don’t care how you couch it, it’s wrong and it’s a game-changer that will send me to another church, my prayers, presence, gifts,service, and witness accompanying me.
We already are tracking you. Any church worth it salt keeps records and is spending a lot of money and or time to do so (even if it’s volunteers who could be better utilized by caring for the poor and needy rather than totalling up spreadsheets), and if they really are trying to stay in the dust of their rabbi, they have mechanisms to reach out to worshipers who have fallen off because of health, sickness, or are blah about of the worship experience.
Conversely, if you are a sunday school class sized congregation saddled/or blessed with your own sanctuary, when someone goes missing for a week, five phone calls were generated before 1pm about “where was Verna Lee this morning?” anyway.
I would be totally creeped out by facial recognition software used in church…and I forwarded this post to my pastor before I read the final section; which was the point of the whole article. May we never lose the personal touch of us caring for each other.
Interesting article. If I work backward from the concluding remarks about the need for personal touch, I think of all the “labor saving” devices and applications available today and wonder where facial recognition software might fit. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 6, and observe the array of other smartphone offerings with a variety of voice, touch, and visual tools all designed to “enhance” or make my life more productive. I think there is some congregation size threshold where, if you are serious about cultivating personal touch, some kind of automation offers possibilities if implemented with member education, participation, and buy-in. I also think of a principle in CRM…Customer Relationship Management…which informs me that if someone misses twice without some kind of personal contact, or my understanding why, I may have “lost” them forever. Do I think there are possibilities for a tool like this, if implemented and used responsibly? You bet. Do I think even engaging in the discussion might lead to more creative and effective engagement with persons within and outside my current circles, in ways I might never consider in isolation…I can only imagine.
By itself, I don’t know how useful this is.
Combined with a connection to other facial recognition software that tells me where my people actually were on Sunday morning, however…