Getting Over the Fear of Facebook
If you want to drive the message of the Church, hop in. But you won't be the only car on the road.
Facebook remains an enigma to the Church.
The few churches using it seem to use it as nothing but a digital bulletin board.
There is power in Facebook. The power is twofold.
- Facebook can build relationships.
- Facebook has reach.
Building Relationships with Facebook
Jason Stambaugh of heartyourchurch.com talks about Facebook as the Weekday Bridge of the Church. It can be used to foster relationships that happen Monday through Saturday. Face-to-face encounters are invaluable, he recognizes. But the little midweek interchanges help to build the connections that make face-to-face interactions more possible, more frequent, and foster more tightly knit community.
The discussion will not be led or moderated as is the custom in the world of religion. That may be why the Church doesn’t understand it. There’s nothing stopping anyone from adding their two cents.
Part of the hesitance of the church to embrace Facebook is fear of losing control.
The fact is the Church lost control of its message a long time ago.
Yesterday, you could control your message with cumbersome qualifying hoops and censorship. Hard habits to break.
Today, the only way to control the message is to be part of the dialogue.
If you want to drive, hop in. But you won’t be the only car on the road!
The Incredible Reach of Facebook
Looking at rough and round numbers, the average Facebook user has nearly 200 friends (a number which continues to grow). Allowing for overlap, each of those friends adds another 100 or so to the network. So if your congregation has 50 people using Facebook during the week, your community has the potential to reach 10,000 people at the first tier of the network and 1,000,000 at the second tier of the network.
- What is your Sunday attendance?
- What is the circulation or readership of your parish newsletter?
- What’s the circulation of your denominational magazine (which probably reaches only those already involved in Church)?
Just do the math and stop spinning your wheels.
photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photo pin cc