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Social Media and the Church

The Virtues of the Modern Evangelist

There was a song taught to children back in the 50s or 60s. It taught us to think of ourselves as missionaries.

Just around the corner lives a stranger child.
Did you smile at him? Were you kind to him?
Did you tell her of the one who loves us so?
Father, Comforter and Friend.

( I updated the lyrics to include the “forgotten” gender.) The question today is “When do we stop thinking of ourselves as missionaries and evangelists and start leaving that to the paid “experts.”

Today many churches and denominations have lost the sense of evangelism. It is just a big word that’s part of a church name. St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for example. Often—despite the name—congregations, regional bodies and denominations forget that their purpose is to spread the gospel to every stranger. It is so easy to become something of a club—one in which you have no right to play if you don’t sufficiently pay.

Fixing this requires an attitude adjustment—an infusion of “evangelical” thinking.

There is good news! It has never been easier or less expensive to fulfill our evangelical purpose. Any church of any size can participate.

Things have changed in the world of evangelism. Decades ago, missionaries had to be carefully trained. They needed to thoroughly understand theology and immerse themselves in a new culture and language. While, this is still helpful, the internet makes it possible for any congregant to interact with any other Christian anywhere in the world. Language barriers are toppling. So are cultural barriers.

There may be some dangers in opening mission work to the less trained, but there is a cure for that. Train us!

Training can begin with the fostering of evangelical traits.

  • Evangelists must be patient. Patience means listening. Patience means allowing for missteps. Patience means taking time—as much time as it takes.
  • Evangelists must be generous. Generosity does not have to mean money. Think first in terms of giving time and attention.
  • Evangelists must think constantly of others. The minute the attention turns inward, toward your congregation and your people or yourself, you will begin to fail.
  • Evangelists must be transparent. Deceitful practices leave lasting scars.There is no room for deceit in preaching the Gospel. Jesus looked for this trait in his disciples and he found it in Nathaniel. “Truly, here is an Israelite within whom there is no deceit.”
  • Evangelists preach a consistent message. We can make the Bible very complicated and confuse even ourselves. If we are confused, our message will be lost on those new to the Gospel. It may help to stick with one Gospel to get started. The Gospel of John is simple and direct, but deep in interpretation that crosses cultural barriers. It is also very inclusive with stories of Jesus’ interaction with men and women, Jew and Gentile, and both the educated and working class.
  • Evangelists cannot be arrogant. God made us all equal in His love.
  • Evangelists cannot be selfish. Our work is not about us.
  • Evangelists must be humble, patient and kind, slow to anger, and steadfast in love and teaching. 
  • They must be curious—full of questions, helping others to discover answers.

Begin your congregational outreach by fostering these traits in your congregation. Start telling the old, old story. Your web site can be your hub. Start publishing mission content and Christians from all over the world will begin to find you.

15 Jun 2012

Blogging for Your Church This Summer

Many churches run on fumes all summer. Pity! Summer is the time of year that people tend to make big changes in their lives. They wait for summer to move and change jobs. They may begin their search for a new church home, right when many churches are all but closed, except for Sunday worship.

Consider this when planning summer ministry. There is a lot to think about. The church web site or blog is a good place to prepare for summer ministry.

Review your site and make sure that any summer events or services that might attract visitors are well-publicized and that the events are truly welcoming to new people. Explain the events on your web site as if the reader knows nothing about your church. If you are doing a good job with your web site or blog, many readers will be learning about your church for the first time.

From Advent in late November and December, to Easter in March or April, followed by the Ascension and Pentecost, all church activities revolve around events in the life of Christ. This is followed by the long church season of ordinary time or in many traditions the season of or after Pentecost. This is the longest season of the liturgical year (June through most of November) or about half the calendar year.

The lectionary typically explores the everyday ministry of Jesus during this time. It is an opportunity for your congregation to be creative.

As you blog this summer, begin with the church lectionary for ideas. Try to tie them into ministry. For example, if the gospel is about healing miracles, explore your congregation’s or denomination’s ministry to those dealing with illness.

Summer is often a time when the favorite hymns are sung. Explore the hymns of Pentecost. Look up the history of a hymn and share it. Run a poll on favorite hymns.

Look at the congregation’s calendar. Will you have a Vacation Bible School? Publicize it. Read the curriculum and share ideas from it. (Give proper credit!) You may not be able to get older children or adults involved during your VBS, but many VBS curriculums publish material for older kids and adults. Get a copy and write posts on the topics presented. Make sure every parent gets the link, so they can learn along with their children.

Scan the church calendar for picnics, service projects and church camp events. Publicize them beforehand. Follow up with photos and testimonials from participants.

In late summer, start to write about back-to-school events. Let people know that activities will soon resume. Work at attracting support for them.

Plan a Rally Day and start to publicize it.

Make sure that any reader who happens across your summer web site is introduced to your church at its most vibrant.

11 Jun 2012

How to Find the Time for Social Media

Here is a link from a blog post on The Christian Century. We hope you find it to be helpful.

11 May 2012

Qualitative Church Statistics vs Quantitative Church Statistics

2×2 has discussed this issue before, but yesterday we heard a social media expert say the same things we were saying from a marketing perspective.

Brian Solis, a leading market analyst, uses the terms qualitative measurement as compared to quantitative measurements.

He discussed how the quantitative statistics of the past mean less in the world that is evolving.

How many members you have on your congregational roster means little compared to the engagement you can measure among both members and nonmembers. There are new possibilities for building relationships with the community that do not fit the old church model. The borders of your community are expanding. (2×2 is just a little church, but we get ministry questions from all over the world.)

This will affect church institutions as well. Supporting Lutheran Social Ministry agencies was a popular option for churches in decades past. Often a representative would attend a service to give a Temple Talk and report on their agency’s good work. Today many churches get involved in local humanitarian efforts through their associations in the community and work. They hear their frequent messages outside of church, are attracted to their causes, and sense they can help. The church’s social agencies (which do a great job!) will get short shrift —unless they too learn to engage with the community in new ways. Secular Social Service agencies are very good at this and will get church members’ attention.

Engagement is a new emphasis. It’s always been important to ministry. Before the advent of Social Media there was no way to measure it. You never know how many people read your fliers and newspaper ads. You can only guess how many people might have listened to your radio spot. Pastors had no idea if their sermons had any lasting effect whatsoever. We shaped our ministries on tradition and guesswork.

Engagement can now be measured. You know how many people visit your web site. You know what topics led them to you. You know which pages they visit and how long they spend on each page. You can engage your visitors with comments, polls and forms long before you meet them.

In some ways it is good that the Church tends to lag behind. We can be beneficiaries of other people’s trailblazing.

But the Church cannot afford to lag too far behind. All churches compete against an overwhelming amount of secular competition.

When our Ambassadors plan a visit, we visit a congregation’s web site first. You can bet that other potential visitors are doing the same thing. We are surprised at how many churches still have NO web site. Many who have web sites have not updated them in years. We clicked on a link for “latest newsletter” and read news from 2009. Even the best SEPA congregational web site we visited was just beginning to get on board with its web potential. They were paying a firm to curate secular feature-type news, a good thing, but still missing the interactive potential of Social Media.

We can’t say it too often or too loud. All congregations must get involved in Social Media if they are to be taken seriously in coming years.

A good denominational goal would be to help every congregation get started and learn to keep up with this vital but fast-changing communication/evangelism medium. You will have to hold a lot of hands in this venture, but it is necessary and worth it. This is concrete help that congregations need and denominations are best positioned to supply.

2×2 can help!

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09 May 2012

Creating an Online Bridge Between Church and Community

Church happens on Sunday, right? Sunday is only one seventh of the church week. But old habits are hard to break. Even the deepest theological thinkers tend to concentrate on Sunday church activities.

If your message goes out to only Sunday morning Christians,
you have a very narrow audience. 

Social Media hands church leaders all the tools needed to extend the church week.

In the past, communicating with people who are not in church on Sunday was a challenge.

  • Newsletters are cumbersome to put together and circulate. They are expensive, too.
  • Phone chains serve a purpose for critical news of death or serious misfortune requiring community prayer.
  • Knocking on doors — it’s just not done anymore!
  • Advertising is expensive and requires planning ahead.

Out of sight Monday through Saturday tends to be out of mind. This has influenced our expectations of ministry.

Social Media changes this. You can and should be communicating daily with church members in a conversation anyone can join.

There are many Social Media tools to consider. Let’s concentrate on three —Facebook, Blogging and Google+.

Facebook

Your members are likely to be spending more than an hour every day checking their Facebook accounts. Statistics show most people spend 20 minutes at a time on Facebook, but they check their account several times a day. The Facebook demographics are growing in every age category. Even the elderly are finding they can connect with distant children and grandchildren.

Develop a strategy that will be welcome to followers, not intrusive.

Churches can share their Sunday morning world in many ways. They can:

  • Post pictures
  • Post video
  • Highlight sermon summaries
  • Tell about activities
  • Pose thought-provoking questions
  • Excerpt a Bible study
  • Feature a meaningful quote
  • Post a teaser question from an upcoming sermon
  • Ask for help on a project
  • Promote an upcoming event

Remember to engage, engage, engage.

Blogs

Blogs are effective, too. Used properly, they will attract an audience of people you do not see on Sunday morning. They are not limited in length and can have a longer “shelf life.”

Blogs are most effective when they address topics of broad interest — not just parish news. Your focus must be outward. If you limit your topics to current church activities, you will burn out. Results will be poor.

We recommend using both a blog and Facebook.

Google+

This is the new kid on the Social Media block and it is up against a well-established giant (Facebook). Nevertheless, it is gaining ground and has definite potential advantages.

  • Google “owns” the search engine world! Activity on their Social Media platform will help you find traffic.
  • Google also owns YouTube, which is growing incredibly fast.
  • Google has pledged to keep their Social Media platform advertising free. (Facebook is all about advertising).

Google+ is beginning to gain acceptance.

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05 May 2012

Ministering in a Design-Driven World: Branding Part 2

An article in Forbes today talks about how design is now a pivotal part of any organization’s identity.

The article speaks to the Church. Churches are accustomed to poor design in their publications. They work with poor equipment and volunteers much of the time. The church newsletter, dotted with cheesy clip art, is fairly standard even among large churches. It’s almost a universal branding—and the branding message is not a good one.

Your members will accept this approach to design. But  is it working beyond your church membership? Is it helping you communicate with the world — a world that is increasingly influenced by design.

Don’t despair. Good design is accessible even to design amateurs.

Facebook makes design simple. All you have to do is upload photos. Everything will fit into the design template. There is still an art to finding, choosing and using photos. Taking your own photos is so easy today, there should be nothing stopping you.

But Facebook is Facebook. One design fits all!

Blogging formats offer the same professional design capabilities with more variety. Start your blog by choosing a theme — there are hundreds to choose from. It will be easy to create a clean and functional web site using a theme (template).

Ask your members to spend an hour taking photos of the neighborhood for you to use on your congregation’s web site, blog or Facebook. Make a contest out of it to get more people involved and add to the fun! They don’t have to be “church” photos. They can be street scenes, store fronts, parks, schools, gardens, fields, sports, architectural features or public events. This will communicate to the unchurched that your congregation cares about the neighborhood.

Be cautious about using images of people without their permission. You can do this by artful cropping. Watch your local TV news for tips. Whenever they take school footage for example they tend to show backs of heads or images of kids walking or playing with heads totally cropped. If the people are your members and they say OK — go ahead and use full images.

Clip art has come of age. There are great sources of photos available for free use if you add a photo credit at the bottom of your post.  Try Photopin or Flickr.

Learn to use a photo image editing program.  (Type “free photo editing software” into your search engine.) Most computers have a basic application pre-installed.  Start by learning to size and crop your photos. Then learn to add type or adjust colors.

It’s time to say good-bye to the amateurish church newsletter. People expect more today. And it isn’t hard to give it to them. It helps to brand your church as progressive and forward-looking, not stuck in the past with out-dated communication skills.

04 May 2012

Let Go and Let God. It was never more possible!

Social Media is going to change the Church—whether or not the Church participates.

The Church is slow to embrace the power of this influence in our lives. It goes against the way the Church has worked for a very long time.

Trust and obey. Foundational words of faith. It means to trust and obey God, by the way.

Somehow the God part gets forgotten. Keeping Christians in line becomes an emphasis of anyone feeling empowered. The lines drawn by church leaders can be moving targets. Ideas change from century to century, decade to decade, and nowadays, year to year.

No one dares to quote the Bible to justify slavery anymore, but it worked for nearly 2000 years.

It worked when slaves had no voice.

Centuries of habit are going to be hard to break, but the time has come to trust the people of God. If we do something egregiously heretical, there are any number of forums for redress. There is no longer a need to monitor the thinking and voice of individual Christians.

We have always believed in this. It’s just been hard to practice.

We teach every three-year-old — Let your light shine.

Then we start to add the “buts” until their little lights are snuffed out.

The Church has never had more potential power. It can motivate and move EVERY member. You don’t have to roster us. You don’t have to qualify us. You don’t have to sort us out by race, age, status, or genitalia. We’ve been structuring our faith around such nonsense for a long time. Someday we are either going to laugh at our historical efforts to limit or exclude (thereby protecting power) — or hang our heads in shame.

This potential power of social media should spur our efforts to effectively share our faith outside the church. We are going to have to be part of the dialog outside our walls — because that’s where the conversations are taking place.

We have to be educators in many forums. We have to mix with the rest of the human race.

That approach has been taken before!

Let Go and Let God.

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02 May 2012

Valuing the Church’s Chatterati

A recent business report recommended that a company’s “chatterati” are as valuable as top management and should be compensated accordingly.

Chatterati are the most effective social media employees. They chat. They personally engage the customers. They trouble shoot problems before they become crises. They know who is in charge, but they also know the people who will solve the problems — in charge or not.  They are social managers. They’ve got the gifts of gab and initiative…and they are a treasure.

How this applies to congregational social media endeavors remains to be seen, but it is an interesting development. 2×2 believes the Church is experiencing a social crisis. Its historic top-down management style is now attempting to manage people who have no familiarity with religious authority, question the need for it, and are prepared to comfortably opt out of religions that stress it.

Chatterati have been around forever. In the past, chatterati had no real value to the church because the only valued communicators were those with theological training. They had sole access to the pulpit and to publishing. If you wanted a voice in the Church, you had to be part of the system.

The challenge to the Church today is to create a channel to put the skills of natural communicators to work.

Even as the mainline Church gasps for breath, it will try to control its message, checking for doctrinal compliance and making sure no one steps on current leadership toes. This will become a futile exercise. The ability of the Church to control its message is gone. The better tactic would be to foster, nurture and take part in resulting dialog. Strong Church leaders will be influencers, not dictators.

The Pope’s recent criticism of women religious is an example. There was a day when scathing criticism from the Vatican would have the religious orders shivering in their habits. The recent reaction from female religious leaders was more on the order of a bemused shrug. 

What’s happening is not a plot or disrespectful defiance. It is a result of technology’s influence on the world. The barriers between leaders and followers have crumbled. Governments are dealing with it. Business is embracing it. The many benefits far outweigh any need for caution. It’s here to stay.

Church, get your chatterati on board. You are going to need them!

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01 May 2012

Hey, Church! Put on Your Listening Ears

A first rule in business is “Listen to Your Customer.” Good businesses are good listeners . . . and amazing responders.

The Church can learn from this.

Every time we are tempted to think we know what’s best for the people we hope will support our churches we should stop dead in our tracks and ask, “Is our ministry driven by their needs or by our needs.”

Are we listening?

Listening is humbling. It is admitting we don’t have all the answers.

We want people to accept us just as we are. That’s natural.

Strangers to church are looking for the same acceptance. We are equally needy.

And so we are on a treadmill. The Church keeps on churning out variations on the same themes, done pretty much the same way, by the same people . . . with the same results.

What we have is cinema’s iconic “failure to communicate.”

When people care enough to tell us exactly why the church has turned them off, we owe it to them to listen — not in a patronizing way. “Poor souls! They just don’t know how wrong they are.”

When we don’t listen, we don’t know what we are missing.

The modern church needs to listen to modern people.  If people are talking to us at all, that’s a sign that they care. If all we do is nod our heads and then criticize them as soon as their backs are turned, we will never be able to reach them.

And they will have proved their point.

An argument is always that we are not of the world. We are here to transform others—to follow the way. However, we are hoping to reach people who are of this world. God sent his Son from heaven to come to earth to be like us, to suffer and die. The only reason He had was that He cared about us. That’s how He approached transformation. The least we can do is listen.

Listen to objections. Find ways to overcome objections. Look for ways to help the entire congregation overcome objections.

Of course, some of the objections are nothing more than excuses. Keep listening until you find the real reason people prefer separation from God’s people.

You’ll be demonstrating that you care.

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26 Apr 2012

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.

  1. Facebook can build relationships.
  2. 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.

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25 Apr 2012