media salt

**Updated September 17**

Just over a month ago, our executive staff finalized the next series for Long Hollow and began kicking around some ideas to build some unique community interaction around the act of confession (also the series title). After a few quick discussions, we decided it would be great to create an anonymous forum where our members could have a safe place to confess their sins to each other and begin the process of healing and restoration.

We’re not the first to attempt something like this, so I was able to look at a few key examples out there before putting together the game plan for our approach. We quickly decided on three things:

1. It needs to be simple to use with an interface that immediately makes sense to our users. It won’t be used much if people have to put any brain power into figuring it out.
2. The design needs to feel honest and weightless rather than flashy and shameful/oppressive.
3. From looking at some other examples out there, we quickly saw that the graphic nature of the posts could actually incite a desire to sin when read; we want to make sure that the confessions on our solution are only as detailed as needed.

With those goals in mind, we were able to whip something up that I believe turned out fairly successful. By limiting the confessions to the length of a tweet, they’re naturally concise and thoughtfully worded. We also set up a lightweight moderation process to enable us to reword and edit for content as needed (only to maintain anonymity and remove overly graphic descriptions). Schedule permitting, I’m also planning to syndicate the confessions through RSS and will possibly link things up to a special Twitter account since the Confessions are already formatted around their 140 character limit. I was surprisingly productive today and added both of these features this morning… The Twitter feed can be found by following lhconfession.

We launched the site (confession.longhollow.com) along with our new series on Sunday and have had a tremendous response so far. Although it obviously compliments the new series, we will probably leave it up for some time after the series (or maybe re-purpose it within longhollow.com) due to the positive impact taking place.

So that’s what we’re doing with it; what do you guys think? Am I overlooking some killer functionality that would make it that much more useful?

**********

Just to clarify a few things… We are not promoting the site as the way to fully confess your sin, but as a way to kick-start the healing and recovery process. We hope that folks will be moved and encouraged enough by the anonymous confessions of others to take the first step into some real accountability.

Immediately after a confession is submitted via the short form, they’re presented with the following message:

“Thank you for sharing.

1 John 1:9 tells us “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us [...]” We first must confess to God, then James 5:16 tells us, “Confess your faults to one another.” If you want to experience true freedom, take what you’ve written here and read it to someone that you feel is safe and trustworthy to hold your confession in confidence.

If you don’t have access to a safe person in your life, please feel free to contact our staff or attend Celebrate Recovery where you might find that safe friend with which to share your struggle in confidence.”

We’re promoting the anonymous confession as a first step to confessing your sin to a trusted person, which will hopefully lead to a lot of prayer and true repentance. In no way, shape or form are we promoting a brief, anonymous confession as the whole of the healing process.

Just wanted to be clear