Tag Archive | Facebook
November 5, 2011  

Doing Church on Facebook

SOURCE: CNN Belief: Doing Church on Facebook at Liberty UniversityLiberty University may be a little too conservative for your inclinations, but the story I ran across this week on CNN Belief teaches us the lesson of not stereotyping.

The story is written by Johnnie Moore who describes himself as an author, pastor, professor and a vice president of Liberty University. He is a board member of World Help and the author of Honestly: Really Living What We Say We Believe. You can keep track of him on Facebook and Twitter.

His article tells the story of how his 1,000 member student congregation could not find a place to meet for their Wednesday worship service since their usual university venues had been reserved by others. 

No problem, let’s do church on Facebook.

Why? Because that is where we are anyway was the response.  So for some time that is what they have done.  The logic goes like this:  Facebook is a community, we like being in community.  The church is supposed to be a community, we like church too.  Let’s do both together!

There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach:

ADVANTAGES

  • Facebook is cool, now, virtually ubiquitous.
  • Facebook is where 800 million users are anyway.
  • It free and easy to use
  • It requires no commitment except to show up.
  • Virtually anything you can do in church you can do in virtual church on Facebook.

DISADVANTAGES

  • Facebook is drop in, not sign up so if that is all you are doing is dropping in you could be missing the best part of being in community which requires active participation more than once a week.
  • Facebook is one size fits all which may work fine if you are doing a structured worship service, but in a multi-generational, multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-language community you may need more than one ‘flavor’ to satisfy the hungry.
  • Facebook could be a good place to pray, to worship together even in the virtual sense, but it may be tougher to satisfy the service to others trilogy of our faith journey unless we actually go out in the vineyard and pull weeds and water the plants.

My point is not to criticize Johnnie Moore and his colleagues at Liberty University but to thank them for giving us ideas we can try ourselves.  But I’m waiting for Johnnie’s next article that tells me how he used Facebook to arrange his social service ministry program of gathering food for the food bank; or that Habitat for Humanity project, or the flash mob trash pickup project that ends up meeting for dinner at a neighborhood hang-out.

My point is that community is about more than showing up—-but given the church decline reality we face—showing up is REALLY GOOD NEWS!  Being in community is about giving of ourselves to serve others and in doing so finding Jesus in our lives and enriching our personal faith journey.

I believe the Episcopal Diocese of California needs a presence on Facebook—but we need more than that—we need a social network of our own that connects our congregations, connects our mission and ministry programs, connects our people in ways that unite us, empower us, celebrate our community connections so we feel like family—-the Body of Christ.

We need a social network that make it easy for us to show up, easy to participate, easy to be part of important events across our faith community—but we need more.

  • We need to learn about the call for volunteers to tutor ten kids in math, science and English in our neighborhood this semester sponsored by another denomination with whom we have chosen to share our social network.
  • We need to discover that we can help 80 year old Mrs Jones down the street get to her doctor’s appointment she otherwise would miss because someone thoughtful in our neighborhood posted the HELP WANTED request on our neighborhood page.
  • We need to hear the call for help from Monument Crisis Center when their food pantry is running low and there are many hungry to feed and by TXTing YES to the number listed we can instantly give $10 to allow the Center to go shopping to meet the need.

Do you see what I mean about the power of doing more than showing up?  A true social network unites us as a family and helps us truly be the Body of Christ by praying, worshiping, serving and loving each other as Jesus loved us.  It is like our neighborhood call list on steroids.  It not only allows us to drop into the conversation around our ‘community kitchen table’ but to be fed by the Holy Spirit by responding to the needs of others as we are able, when we are able, as often as we are able.  That is more than showing up!

Our social network is more than a party line, it is more than a Facebook place to hangout—it is our place to get involved, to help others, to discover Jesus in our lives and drink deeply from all the blessings our community presents to us each day to learn, to pray, to discover, to support others in their time of need.

Our social network empowers EACH OF US acting on our own to BE THE BODY OF CHRIST in ways we might not otherwise every hear about.  But our social network does something else—something more powerful and satisfying—it builds community, makes us feel like family, like we belong and it feeds our soul and brings us back to the Table eager for renewal, thankful for the blessings in our lives, joyous that through service to others we have found true peace.

Be in community!

Related articles
September 15, 2011  

The Growth Potential from Social Networking the Church

Social Media Report: Spending Time, Money and Going Mobile

This Social Media Report was released recently by Nielsen.  It provides a fresh look at the growing power of social networking and its potential to bring together groups of many types. 

A key consideration in the the Church Growth Program is how to use social networking to link together church members, give the unchurched access to information and programs that could attract them to the Episcopal Church, and how to use this new disruptive technology to improve collaboration and involvement of church members not just in the Diocese of California but around the world.

I have included linked to the Nielsen study so you can read it yourselves.

Gary Hunt

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/social-media-report-spending-time-money-and-going-mobile/

Social media not only connects consumers with each other, but also with just about every place they go and everything they watch and buy. Nielsen’s new Social Media Report looks at trends and consumption patterns across social media platforms in the U.S. and other major markets, exploring the rising influence of social media on consumer behavior.

Highlights of Nielsen’s “State of the Media: The Social Media Report”

  • Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet
  • At over 53 billion total minutes during May 2011, Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other website
  • Tumblr is an emerging player in social media, nearly tripling its audience from a year ago
  • Nearly 40 percent of social media users access social media content from their mobile phone
  • Internet users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of social networking through the Mobile Internet
  • 70 percent of active online adult social networkers shop online, 12 percent more likely than the average adult Internet user
  • Across a sample of 10 global markets, social networks and blogs are the top online destination in each country, accounting for the majority of time spent online and reaching at least 60 percent of active Internet users

For a more in-depth look at the social media landscape and audience, view the complete State of the Media: The Social Media Report.

Related articles
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.