The Growth Potential from Social Networking the Church

Social Media Report: Spending Time, Money and Going Mobile

This Social Media Report was released recently by Nielsen.  It provides a fresh look at the growing power of social networking and its potential to bring together groups of many types. 

A key consideration in the the Church Growth Program is how to use social networking to link together church members, give the unchurched access to information and programs that could attract them to the Episcopal Church, and how to use this new disruptive technology to improve collaboration and involvement of church members not just in the Diocese of California but around the world.

I have included linked to the Nielsen study so you can read it yourselves.

Gary Hunt

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/social-media-report-spending-time-money-and-going-mobile/

Social media not only connects consumers with each other, but also with just about every place they go and everything they watch and buy. Nielsen’s new Social Media Report looks at trends and consumption patterns across social media platforms in the U.S. and other major markets, exploring the rising influence of social media on consumer behavior.

Highlights of Nielsen’s “State of the Media: The Social Media Report”

• Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet
• At over 53 billion total minutes during May 2011, Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other website
• Tumblr is an emerging player in social media, nearly tripling its audience from a year ago
• Nearly 40 percent of social media users access social media content from their mobile phone
• Internet users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of social networking through the Mobile Internet
• 70 percent of active online adult social networkers shop online, 12 percent more likely than the average adult Internet user
• Across a sample of 10 global markets, social networks and blogs are the top online destination in each country, accounting for the majority of time spent online and reaching at least 60 percent of active Internet users

For a more in-depth look at the social media landscape and audience, view the complete State of the Media: The Social Media Report.

Related articles

• Nielsen Releases Their “State of the Media: The Social Media Report” (blogworld.com)
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• Social networking top online activity in U.S. (canada.com)
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Lessons of Church Decline and Renewal

The Episcopal Church is not the only mainline protestant denomination with declining membership.  It is a disease as common as the common cold. But it is going to take more than clever ads trying to attract disaffected Roman Catholics to get the church growing again.

But so far, the mainline churches have not found a remedy for the disease.  Is the church boring?  It is relevant in the lives of the faithful? These are questions being asked, but we know from greeting newcomers that there still is a yearning to find a way to have Christ in our lives.  We still feel the call of parents of young children seeking to  give them a solid Christian foundation upon which to grow and develop lifetime values.  We still feel the need for solace and renewal in the voice of one who has lost a spouse or child.  We hear the pleas of those who are lonely, sick, troubled, and adrift.  There is a yearning for spiritual healing, renewal, community and hope that can not be found anywhere else.  The job of the church and each of us as part of the Body of Christ is to give it to them! This is the mission of the church today and tomorrow as it has been for a millennium.

Stopping the decline in church membership and attendance is not about abandoning the values of the church or its caring for the faithful.  It is about finding news ways to connect with them, to reach out to them, to be with them in a world of constant change. It is making them feel loved not just welcomed.  It is asking them to help us not just show up and watch.  We become the Body of Christ by being busy doing God’s work not just sitting there each Sunday transferring body heat to the wood pews.

News reports surface regularly of more bad news about the decline in church membership, average Sunday attendance and participation.  The latest from the Southern Baptists with the message to quit denying reality and wake up, people! The story in the Baptist Press by Ed Stetzer is from a guy who knows a thing or two about church growth and church planting.  His prescription is a mixture of doing more of everything the Southern Baptists have done:

1. A need for mission deo to get out there and do God’s work in the vineyard
2. A need for diversity
3. A need for a new generation
4. A need for renewal in church planting.

The article is plaintive and sad because even though Stetzer is talking about growing the church his prescription is more recommendations on trying home remedies that have not yet cured his patient.  You can’t just go through the motions.

“We don’t change until the pain of staying the same grows greater than the pain of change. May the truth break our hearts, drive us to our knees and compel us into the mission.”

In an equally pessimistic blog post by Jay Vorhees, a pastor in a declining United Methodist congregation, he laments that each day he hopes for a kind of Lazarus miracle that will somehow result in the Holy spirit breathing new life into a failed body.  He says he tries to tell his congregation the truth but often they don’t want to hear it.

These two examples are part of the reason churches are ‘in a rut’ today.  We don’t want to come to church to be depressed.  These examples focus on the past not the future.  They see things that are bad not the joy in the church.  They relate to people in the ways of yesterday not the ways of today or the aspirations for a joyful tomorrow.  For them things happening are depressing.

The church is about joy!

Contrast these first two examples with a paper written by a young Presbyterian pastor on social media policies and his own experience when his congregation told him it would not buy him a smart phone.

“When I graduated from a Presbyterian seminary and took my first position as a part-time pastor in a small rural church, I expected my days of heavy social media use would soon end. Before I arrived, the congregation rejected my request for a smart-phone, and when I finally did move into my office I found a large stack of ancient cassette tapes on my desk. Surely my days of frequent networking on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs were over. Surely I would soon experience the loneliness many rural pastors feel, disconnected from their colleagues due to geography and lack of communication. But, to my surprise and joy, I was dead wrong.

Within a few months of beginning my time as pastor at a small rural church, I had found a supportive and very helpful community on Twitter with which I interacted daily. I explored Facebook groups and several online chat platforms with ministry colleagues. My blog became a valuable ministry tool for conversation and collaboration. Even a status update on Facebook could bring comments of support and encouragement (e.g. a book suggestion, a website recommendation, a word of caution or calm, even a prayer). I also found, to my surprise, that my congregation had a Facebook page of its own that I could update and use to connect to those in our community (Facebook, 2010). Furthermore, as I continued my practice of blogging on the church, ministry, and contemporary issues, as well as posting any sermons I preached, I slowly found that members of my congregation enjoyed reading my blog — and especially consulting the sermons they heard on Sunday mornings. Though they would rarely comment on posts online, many members have told me in person that they peruse my website often. In person, then, we discuss my blog posts or the comment of another read posted online.”

Do you feel the difference in tone and the sense of optimism rather than pessimism in the voice of Pastor Adam Copeland.  Maybe he was just young and not yet grounded in the ways of the established church.  Maybe he didn’t realize he was not supposed to adapt the technology and social media customs he acquired in college to his work as a pastor.

But a funny thing happened in a stogy old congregation resistant to change—-Adam connected with the people in the pews in ways they could scarcely have imagined.  He got to know them, and they him.  They bonded and worked together and prayed together—isn’t that what church is supposed to be about?

The technology did not change the church.  It changed the attitudes of the people about the value and meaning and potential of the church for their lives.  And that makes all the difference.

Related articles

• CHURCH2GO: Connecting the Body of Christ in an Episcopal Social Network (discernablefutures.wordpress.com)
• Episcopal Realities: Getting Back to Growth (discernablefutures.wordpress.com)
• The Dwindling Church: Can We Stop the Bleeding? (lifebrook.wordpress.com)
• Pastors in jeans and Hawaiian shirts (johnmeunier.wordpress.com)
• Southern Baptists Have Fewest Baptisms Since The 1950s And Are Losing Members (huffingtonpost.com)

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20/20 Vision: What Role for Social Media?

Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches is the title of a recent article by Dr. Elizabeth Drescher a religion writer and scholar of Christian spirituality at Santa Clara University.  She argues that part of the popularity of social media is that they help people feel in community with each other across a wide range of areas important to their lives.

Churches, she argues, used to play that role but less so today because church social relationships are too superficial to be reinforcing.

Whether you buy that argument or not, it is true that we see people drawn to causes or opportunities to get involved beyond church.

Our 20/20 Vision goal of being a welcoming parish open to all requires that we reach out to the unchurched and underserved in our community to invite people to try out St. Timothy’s rather than just waiting for people to show up on our door step.  This marketing and ‘outreach’ is new to us but not new to the church.  Our challenge is to find ways to reach those likely to be most attracted to our parish community.  Today that means social media connects and a steady, persistent, and attention-getting marketing and communications strategy.

Which brings us to the question she asks in the article:

“Can social media redeem the church?

The short answer is of course, “no.” Maybe the long one is, too.

Indeed, experimental psychologist Richard Beck recently set the religion blogosphere—forgive me—atwitter with a post entitled, “How Facebook Killed the Church.” Beck, a professor at Abilene Christian University, argues that, rather than replacing face-to-face relationships with so many digital doppelgangers, “Facebook tends to reflect our social world,” extending and enriching established friendships rather than, by and large, inviting the development of new ones that take us away from longstanding networks of friends, family, and coworkers.

Beck draws on unpublished research on college retention that showed that freshmen with active Facebook engagement were more likely to return for their sophomore year precisely because their Facebook activity was closely correlated to meaningful face-to-face relationality. This echoes other findings about the more narrow scope of active Facebook affiliations, despite the number of “friends” a person’s profile page might boast.

With regard to churches, Beck reads the data as suggesting that Facebook and other social media are replacing what he believes is the “main draw of the traditional church: social connection and affiliation.”

It’s an engaging argument. Beck is certainly right that church is no longer a central gathering place for the majority of believers and seekers. And, it seems, too, that Facebook has taken up much of the chat about “football,… good schools,… local politics,” and other matters that Beck sees as the “main draw” of routine ecclesial practice in days gone by. Yet the sneak peek Beck offers of his own research appears to undermine the argument.

Not Enough Social to Go Around

The relationships among the undergraduates in Beck’s research were not formed on Facebook, they were enriched by students’ continued digital contact. The problem with regard to churches and other religious communities (and we see this over and over again with Facebook group pages whose only visitors are the minister and the technophile parishioner who championed the church’s foray into the digital domain) seems to be that there’s not enough social to go around.

That is, if church were, indeed, a robustly social experience, Facebook would enrich and extend that experience, enhancing week-to-week retention through ongoing conversation with valued friends—just as it appears to do with undergraduates moving from the first to the second year of college. Thin connections in face-to-face settings are not magically transformed by technology.

Other data suggests deeper reasons for believers and seekers’ abandonment of the institutional church, much of it linked to an understanding of the “social” that has more to do with involvement in practices of compassion, justice, and stewardship than it does with mere interpersonal entertainment. An extensive body of data on growing participation in volunteer activities, especially among young people, and the connection of this activity to religious organizations and spiritual values that are not nurtured in other settings suggests that people are not leaving the church merely because they can more easily connect socially with friends on Facebook. Social media participation does correlate positively to charitable and civic group participation. But here again, where people already have meaningful interpersonal affiliations, social media supports those relationships.

Beyond a growing distaste for the rancor around hot-button issues like human sexuality, gender equity, and reproductive choice, people seem to be put off church because they are able to do the kind of work—tending the sick, advocating for the oppressed, caring for the earth, comforting those in trouble or need—that was long the stock in trade of local churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples; but which, through the modern corporatizing of mainstream religions, was largely outsourced to separate agencies.

This is why you’ll probably find more people volunteering in any given week at Martha’s Kitchen food pantry in downtown San Jose, California than at Sunday services at the church across the street. If Facebook is killing the church, that is, it’s probably more accurate to call it an assisted suicide.”

Elizabeth Drescher, PhD, is a religion writer and scholar of Christian spiritualities who teaches at Santa Clara University. Her book Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation will be released in Spring 2011. Her Web site is elizabethdrescher.net.

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