We tweeted a link to this compelling advice from one of social media’s leading voices.
Since we are just starting with Twitter and have a small following, we are providing a link on this post. His arguments are on target. Church leaders need only substitute the ecclesiastic equivalent to the business world to understand the analogy. His advice applies to any church serious about mission.
Here’s the link. Please, TWEET it as part of our experiment.
2×2 records banner statistics as 2012 draws to a close
2×2 will soon enter its third year of online ministry. Very few churches are experimenting with content evangelism. This is new territory.
We have been forced into online ministry by the confiscation of our property and the abandonment of traditional leadership. Online numbers are the only thing we can measure. We don’t have property or a pastor to pay. We have few expenses outside of unending law suits.
This was an interesting week statistically. For the last five weeks or so we’ve been inching up to 400 readers per week. We got as high as 397 without breaking 400. We fluctuated a bit, week by week, with our monthly totals steadily climbing for the last six months. Our daily readership also climbed steadily during the latter part of 2012.
This week we broke the 400 mark—and the 500 mark—and the 600 mark. 604 readers visited 2×2 last week.
Keep in mind that Redeemer’s ability to fulfill its mission was the lame excuse offered to justify the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s self-serving land grab. SEPA paraded false statistics before a Synod Assembly that was duped into taking foolish actions. Redeemer was allowed no say at the time (under questionable constitutionality)—by design.
Now we have independent statistics to prove our viability.
And a little church shall lead the way
2×2 is the focus of Redeemer’s mission. We pay daily attention to our blog’s statistics so we can do a better job. It’s not just a numbers game. We are forming real relationships with our readers all over the world. We are sharing freely what we are learning.
We look beyond the numbers to determine what the numbers represent. Online ministry is very measurable.
This week, an Ambassadors post early in the week attracted unusual attention, mostly on Monday but a little on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, that interest had died. We expected the numbers to plummet to 20, 30 or 40 visits per day. They didn’t. By the end of the week, all the traffic was from the usual sources (people searching for ministry ideas), only at two or three times the previous week’s numbers.
Redeemer continues its dedication. We have numbers to back up our claims. Along with the statistics is evidence of Redeemer’s growing reach. We have readers all over the world. We may even lay claim to being one of the largest Lutheran churches within SEPA’s geographical area. But we are not limited by geography!
Imagine a different scenario than the one fostered by SEPA leadership
Imagine what we could be doing
if we had a place to meet for worship.
if we had a facility to hold workshops on the things we are learning.
if the pastor who had given us a five-year commitment hadn’t been chased off.
if our property were serving the community and earning income to satisfy existing debt and support even more outreach.
if we were free to monetize our site without interference.
if our members were not burdened or intimidated by lawsuits.
if we had a pastor to work with us and care about us.
And there’s the rub! It’s in that last bulleted item. The lay people of Redeemer now have more experience at this type of ministry than almost all ELCA pastors.
And so we are condemned and excluded. Not because we lack “missional” focus but because professional leaders, steeped in 19th and 20th century ministry models, don’t know how to work with us.
Who knows how long SEPA will keep Redemer’s doors locked until they feel they can totally control a ministry they never understood?
They have looked the other way as Grace, Roxborough, failed and their building and parsonage were sold to benefit SEPA. They allowed Epiphany, Upper Roxborough, to break its covenant with Redeemer and vote to close—assets going to SEPA. Only landlocked Bethany remains to serve several Philadelphia neighborhoods—East Falls, Wissahickon, Roxborough, and Manayunk.
A resurgence of ministry there without new focus is unlikely, but SEPA would rather watch traditional ministries struggle with an arrogant “we told you so” hanging in the air than help them to experiment beyond the experience of available leadership.
SEPA congregations and clergy look on with approval, touting the wisdom of its leaders, and protecting their own endangered territories.
Meanwhile, little, unrecognized Redeemer just keeps growing. Without property, without money, without professional leaders, Redeemer grows!
God is doing something new in East Falls.
When will SEPA and the ELCA perceive it?
Screen shot of Redeemer’s statistics toward the end of the December 2, 2012. We actually closed the day with 604 site visits — two more visited before the Cinderella hour.
On the first of the month, Redeemer always looks forward to holding our own worship service at the Old Academy Theater. The Ambassadors arrived still enthusiastic about our visit to St. John’s, Mayfair, last week. One of our Ambassadors enjoys the history and architecture of the churches we visit. She asked about the two cornerstones—one pre-Civil War and one from the mid-20th century. We discovered a connection we didn’t know we had. Our pastor, one of only a couple of SEPA/ELCA pastors not afraid to be seen in public with us, once served St. John’s back in the 1960s. (Yes, we have a pastor, in fact we have two who worship with us regularly!) He told us a bit of its history, how it used to be downtown and how the new church had been designed to showcase its beautiful German windows. He talked about how the educational wing was once filled with Sunday School students and how it had a friendly competition with St. Paul’s in Olney. Its membership then was more than 2000. Latest Trend reports have them holding their own in the 600s, with a little fluctuation, most recently reported at 695, a third of them worshiping members.
Google Twitter. The Twitter site will come up first in Google results and you will see the sub-option SIGN UP. Click on that and follow the instructions.
You will need to supply your name and an email address. You can use your current email or open a free account dedicated to Twitter — it’s up to you. We did not have a dedicated 2×2 email address before. We opened a free G-mail account with Google.
You will have some options in creating a profile. Twitter will guide you through the start-up steps. Don’t be alarmed that you are asked to choose some people or organizations to follow right from the start. Twitter will present lists of celebrities who might appeal to your interests. You may have no interest in any of them. (We followed Lady Gaga, Steve Carrell and National Geographic. How’s that for eclectic!)
All of this is just to get you going. Twitter is all about following and being followed and they are trying to teach you good Twitter habits from the start. You can unfollow (stop following) any person or organization at any time. Stick with the ones that are fun. Click “unfollow” if they annoy you (there will be some that bombard you with self-promotion). By taking note of what annoys us, we will be able to figure out how we want to be perceived on Twitter.
We met our daily goal. We posted a blog about tweeting. We retweeted something we liked. We posted our Riddle Tweet and followed up with the answer an hour later (following the professional advice to not tweet more than once in an hour). In addition, we tweeted our worship plans for tomorrow.
Spent about a half hour writing today’s blog post and less than 10 minutes on Twitter.
Our post picked up one “Like” so far. (Thanks, Christian).
2×2 started with no followers yesterday. We have four followers today.
If you want to follow our month-long Twitter experiment, join Twitter and follow us at:
So what should we tweet about? That IS the question.
We noticed that South Dakota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America began their Advent season by tweeting the first verse of a popular Advent hymn:
Light one candle to watch for Messiah. Let the light banish darkness.
That’s a nice thought. We will retweet it. (More on retweeting later).
But we are also remembering the advice from the pros: social media is about connecting with others. If we want followers, our tweets have to appeal to others or people will just gloss over them. So we are going to work on a mix of material to use in our tweets. We won’t avoid the message of the Gospel but we will talk about things that might appeal to an even broader audience. In addition we will write about things happening here in our neighborhood (roughly East Falls, Germantown, Wissahickon, Manayunk and Roxborough and the tail end of City Line Avenue in Philadelphia).
We are going to start with something just for fun. It’s a riddle. We’ll pose the question in the first tweet and an hour or so later, we will tweet the answer.
Remember, we are new at this, too. This is a process of discovery for all of us.
So today’s task won’t take more than 10 minutes and half of that will be first time jitters.
Retweet the South Dakota Synod’s tweet.
Tweet our own riddle.
Tweet the answer to our riddle.
If you want to take part in the experiment. Start your Twitter account and start following us! We will follow you back! Let’s see if Twitter is as powerful as they say it is!
Facebook, the king and queen of social media, has some problems as a platform for churches.
To be used well, it is a lot of work.
It is unabashedly about monetization of cyberspace.
The rules change frequently.
It can easily become more intimidate than a congregation of unrelated people want to be part of. Facebook rules just changed recently to make posts more public than many users ever intended their Facebook pages to be. We’ll wait with everyone else for the fallout on that.
Facebook has been embraced by business and some nonprofits. They are more likely to have a top-down structure with monetary and hierarchical controls. In other words, Facebook will be part of somebody’s job. It might be their whole job. Few churches can afford that!
Twitter on the other hand comes with some control. You can create a following but you can direct your “tweets.”
The Twitter platform is stripped to the bone. You are limited to 140 characters (practically 120 characters). Who can’t write one sentence a day!?
Let’s look at Twitter. What is it, anyway?
Twitter is a social media platform first designed for people to answer the question, “What are you doing?”
People send simple, short messages. No pictures. No video. No fancy type.
The first reaction from the public, the echoes of which can still be heard, was “I don’t care what you are doing!”
But some people kept reporting their activities to the world anyway.
They soon learned the difference between “This sandwich is delicious.” and “Route 95 is backed up 20 miles. Stay away!”
Slowly with explosive bursts of potential, the world began to realize that there is power in caring about what someone else is doing and how we can influence what happens to them.
Does that not sound mission-oriented?
The power of Twitter is in making connections. Once those connections are made. It is really up to us what we do with them. Twitter is the spark.
There is a good explanation of this power in the book The Tao of Twitter, by Mark Schaefer. There are many good books explaining Twitter. Most of them are written from a marketing point of view. Marketers tend to love numbers and analytics, which if you can bear reading them, are impressive.
(We’ve provided a link to Amazon in our widget column for this inexpensive book.)
Most pastors and church people are not “numbers” people. If they were, they may have already fled the church scene. Church numbers are dismal at first glance and alarming with analysis.
Mark’s book dwells on Twitter’s power, beginning with person to person, one-on-one power. This is something every church needs. It is foundational to mission.
The current and traditional church mission focus is invitational. Build a building, open the doors on Sunday morning, and hope that people are curious enough during those few hours of the week to come to us. We sit in our big churches and wait. For decades we didn’t know how to do mission any other way. The tools to do a better job were out of reach, practically and economically. So we keep doing things the same way, rewarding the congregations that do this the best, despite the nagging realization that even the biggest churches are statistically ineffective.
To use Twitter, requires making an effort to unlearn and change this collective mindset.
How does Twitter differ from Facebook?
Twitter is beautifully stripped down. You must tell your story in less than 140 characters. Church people can respond to this limitation in one of two ways.
Protest! We can’t possibly tell our message in 140 characters.
Cheer! How hard can it be to write one sentence a day!
Twitter will be manageable for any pastor or any lay leader. It is possible to put Twitter to work with as little as 15 or 20 minutes of effort per day. That’s good news!
Join Bishop Ruby Kinisa as she visits small churches "under cover" to learn what people would never share if they knew they were talking to their bishop.
Undercover Bishop will always be available in PDF form on 2x2virtualchurch.com for FREE.
Print or Kindle copies are available on Amazon.com.
For bulk copies, please contact 2x2: creation@dca.net.
Contact Info
You can reach
Judy Gotwald,
the moderator of 2x2,
at
creation@dca.net
or 215 605 8774
Redeemer’s Prayer
We were all once strangers, the weakest, the outcasts, until someone came to our defense, included us, empowered us, reconciled us (1 Cor. 2; Eph. 2).
2×2 Sections
Where in the World is 2×2?
On Isaiah 30:15b
Be calm. Wait. Wait. Commit your cause to God. He will make it succeed. Look for Him a little at a time. Wait. Wait. But since this waiting seems long to the flesh and appears like death, the flesh always wavers. But keep faith. Patience will overcome wickedness.
—Martin Luther
