Overcoming the Absence of A Model to Follow

The Church often has a hard time looking outside its monastic walls for advice. In this case it may be necessary. There are models to follow; they may not be created by Church organizations.

A wonderful thing about Social Media is that it forces you to work a plan. We have published a basic plan to follow in crafting a Social Media Strategy. We adapted it from information shared in forums held for corporations. If you don’t want to work a plan, you can keep holding monthly meetings— trying one disconnected and ineffective idea after another. This can certainly keep you busy!

Here are a few models worth reviewing. There is something to be learned from each. Churches can mix and match to suit their demographic and particular needs. Most of these are examples of blogs, which is where we think congregations should start their Social Media exploration.

Pastoral Leadership in Blogging

Expect resistance until the power of the blog is understood. Pastors will be tempted to republish their Sunday sermon—which no one is likely to read. Pastors should consider a new art form in preaching—short, concise thoughts with an appealing twist that readers will come to anticipate. Aim for 200 words. The model to study: Marketing Guru Seth Godin. His daily blog offers an insight on many topics. Every so often he points readers to a longer document or even a book. He looks at things people in his field see every day and instead of just reporting them, he analyzes them, making his readers question the accepted.

Did we say this was new? It is actually a big part of the New Testament! We call them parables.

Community Building in Blogging

Jason Stambaugh of heartyourchurch.com teaches how to use Facebook to create community in the church. He uses examples from his own Facebook work in his small Maryland community church.

Teaching Through Blogging

Here is untapped potential for leadership training in the church. The model to follow is Michael Stelzner’s socialmediaexaminer.com. In just a couple of years, Mike built a business around teaching social media and is respected worldwide. His model taps into internet scalability. You can join his clubs and get advice from thousands of people.

Thought Leadership Through Blogging

2×2 attempts to engage readers in analyzing the mission of the Church to find ways to serve that complement traditional church ways but not to the exclusion of innovation. There are enough people who do little but complain that things are failing in the Church. We try to find the reasons why things are going wrong. This is hard for the Church, since tradition is important and leaders rarely like to be seen as mavericks. Questions are not likely to be raised by church-sponsored employees or media. We try to do the job they can’t—or won’t.

Inspiration Through Blogging

One of 2×2’s member churches publishes a Bible verse daily. Nothing more. Just a Bible verse in their followers inbox each day. Seems so simple. It is often very comforting to start the day with a Bible quote. These can be scheduled to go out automatically, so it isn’t as hard as it might sound. Just pick out a month’s worth of favorite quotes and schedule them using a service such as HootSuite. You can always add an insight or prayer as in devotional books.

Networking Through Blogging

Blogging excels at building networks. If you start a blogging ministry, you are likely to be surprised by the people who find you and follow you. It takes a some time but soon your congregation will have friends all over the world. 2×2 is a model for this, too.

Church Ministry Help Through Blogging

Pastors can turn to workingpreacher.org, published by Luther Seminary, to kickstart their thinking of the weekly scriptures. There is no reason why this concept can’t work for congregations and lay people too. Pastors can turn to sermons4kids for ideas for children’s sermons. Both lay and professional church workers can be part of a community serving children’s ministry. We didn’t set out to make this our specialty, but we noticed in our statistics that the number one search term which brings people to our site is “object lessons for adults.” We have responded by posting an object lesson once every week or two.

Be A Pioneer

Create your own model and share it. That’s the power of the internet!

photo credit: Mike_tn via photo pin cc