I was intrigued this morning as I was reading through various opinions, blogs and newspapers from around the world as part of my ongoing addiction to information by an article by the Lebanon News (Lebanon, Pennsylvania, not Lebanon, the country next to Syria) on the use of Facebook in churches.
In it, the journalist expressed the usual wide-eyed wonder that churches have heard about Facebook, that they many are using it to help themselves grow and that bigger churches are, on average, more likely to use Facebook effectively than smaller churches. At this point, the article was sounding similar to any other article that I have read and I was about to move on when a quote from one of the pastors they were featuring caught my eye.
Love it or loathe it (and most of the time, I personally loathe it), social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter are here to stay and have become a dominant way of communicating on the net. With these platforms, a whole variety of online conversations are taking place with a level of connectivity that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago.
All these developments mean that we as churches have to start thinking about how we respond to the presence of the new kid on the block and connect with these tools in a way that is life-giving and useful in mission.
Lifeway Research has recently released some data on how churches are using social media. I think it’s interesting to see how churches are embracing new technologies, so I have tried to illustrate the data in the most accessible fashion possible. I hope you find this infographic useful. There is a full-size A4 version available as a PDF – please email me if you would like to use it, and I will send it to you.
