Many of my clients are Christian churches, and especially Catholic due to my time in seminary studies for the priesthood and heavy involvement in Catholic New Media. But even though the Catholic Church big-wigs are screaming from the mountain top that priests, religious, and churches in general need to have an online and social presence there are very few actually jumping into the water feet first. Pope Benedict recently created the Pontifical Council for New Evangelization in an effort to step forward in reaching the secular world.

Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, vidoes, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis. – Pope Benedict XVI (44th World Communications Day)

The way I see it, there are 3 areas were Christians can benefit greatly from social media.

1. Community
2. Preaching & Teaching
3. Call to Action

Community

One of social media’s greatest draws is its ability to build communities of people that are like minded. Never before in other ages has the internet provided a way to find and interact with someone who likes the same exact thing as you. It has the amazing ability to connect people that feel isolated or alone. Much like Christ inserted himself into the communities of the day by eating meals with those cast out or society or by teaching in the synagogues with the learned, he lived where they lived. Today, the Church needs to be in the trenches of modern day community. If people are spending their time on Facebook, Christians should be interacting with them there. I was shocked how many Churches refused to go anywhere near MySpace because it was a “dangerous” place or they didn’t want to be “associated” with a service like “that”, but Christ went “to where the sinners lived”. He reached out to them directly thru community first, then taught them how to get out of sin. He always loved and lived wit them before he taught or preached to them.

Preaching & Teaching

I think the most central call of Christ was that we are not only to hear his message and continue living our lives, but we are required to spread the message. Just as St. Paul stood from the mountain tops and spread the message of Christ and his teaching, social media is the new digital mountain. Pope Benedict XVI has spoken many times of this new “digital continent” that exists in the world, where people work and play. I think social media stands as the mountain top of this new continent. It is where a single voice can carry loudly to the masses very very quickly. Social media has the ability to leverage people’s curiosities for more information. The best social people or services to follow are always the ones with relevant and interesting content. What can be more engaging than someone using this tool to explain or at bare minimum expose people to a teaching about Christ that is confusing or completely misunderstood? Here we must make a point though that social media is a tool to engage, not a “ministry” in itself. We need to remember that all of these methods are to guide people to Christ, not to let them stay safely in their twitter clients or web browsers. It should always invite people to go deeper into the message, instead of taking it for just face value.

Call to Action

As we talk about inviting people to go deeper we touch upon one of the greatest area where Christianity can take advantage of social media. If we continue to use social media to bring people together, teach and inform them about Christ, then naturally we need to complete the process and call them to action or change. Social media has great potential for spreading a message fast. I only takes one person to post a message that quickly gets reposted, re-tweeted, or “liked”, for it to reach millions in a matter of hours. People feel part of the cause by simply passing the message along to their followers or friends. It makes it easy to “get out the vote” or draw attention to injustice. In recent years, social media has been used to rocket donations or fundraising for disasters. As people of faith we need to leverage these services to bring people from spectators to activists. Where we are trying to get people on their knees praying or on their feet protesting injustice, we need to tell them how to help. One of the biggest complaints about people in the Church is involvement, but people just need to be called passionately to get involved online and they will make the jump to getting involved in reality.

How to do it?

Now that I got you all riled up to use social media, how the heck do you take advantage of it? Well first off, make sure that once you get involved, you stay involved. Lack of participation can make social initiatives die fast! If you don’t feel that you can handle it yourself, find someone who can before you get involved. Whether a local tech savvy parishioner or a professional you can trust, someone with the know how can help rocket your efforts into a wider audience. If you don’t have the budget for a professional there is tons that can be achieved just by getting on these services personally and getting a feel for being a social media user. Priests and pastors should have Facebook accounts and blogs at bare minimum. Below you will find a few resources that can help you get started and as always you can make a comment or send us an email with more questions. Remember that these services are tools, use them, don’t make them the end, that’s supposed to Christ. If you use these service to draw people to Him, then they will be successful, but if they become simply a vanity page where you want people to “follow” you, then you have missed the boat. Christ’s voice is a sweet whisper, just use these services to let people hear it loud and clear from the digital mountain top.

Resources

• Facebook (if you aren’t on it, get on it NOW!!)
  • Church Marketing sucks has a 3 articles (as of this articles writings) of a 5 part series on how to churches can leverage Facebook.
  • Part 1: Getting Church Staff to Care, Part 2: How their Church uses Facebook, Part 3: Pastor’s on Facebook
• Twitter (great for quick micro-blogging, and generate buzz)
  • Article on using why Twitter can be extremely useful for Churches
• Great post about how to get involved in social media.
• Another post about how to get people involved in your cause.
• A good book to help break into social media.
• 16 Social Media Insights for Catholics for the National Catholic Register