Tag: Social media

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.

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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.

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CHURCH2GO: Connecting the Body of Christ in an Episcopal Social Network

The long slow decline of mainline Protestant churches including our own Episcopal Church is forcing us to re-think how we do church, the root causes of that decline and how we can turn it around. In God’s creation nothing stands still.  Everything changes and grows or it slows down and dies. The church is not dying, but it is also not growing and thus not serving God’s purpose in our lives as it should.

Ritual and Renewal is Good but Not sufficient. We still celebrate the ritual and traditions of our faith, the feast days and celebrations of the church seasons and the spiritual power of our corporate worship when we gather together around the table as one family becoming the Body of Christ.  But the church is clearly losing something that enables it to be responsive the needs of the people in the pews, or not in the pews anymore!  We don’t have to give up on church, but we do have to keep it relevant in our lives and those of our kids.

This is the first of a series of thinking out loud posts about church vitality. The history and evolution of the church tells us the church itself was the center of community life in villages or neighborhoods as cities grew.  The church was also the center of family life for a long time.  But in our mobile lives today it is no longer the church buildings that center us.  Instead we need ways to stay connected to each other, stay involved in the ministries and causes we care about and our life together as the Body of Christ even though we are not physically in the pews. That is what social networks are doing in our business and personal lives.

In March I wrote in 20/20 Vision: What Role for Social Media about the power of social networks in our lives today.  These social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and others shrink our world by connect us in person-to-person ways we could scarcely imagine only a few years ago.  We are not making effective use of these tools and they are a powerful force for good in helping arrest the decline in the growth of the church by getting people engaged, involved and empowered doing God’s work.

Putting social networking to work for the church 

Perhaps the single most powerful thing the Diocese of California could do for church vitality today would be to create and nurture the growth of a social network to empower and connect its members .If we could get people in congregations connected together and then connect congregations together for each of our missions and ministries, programs and the institution of the church we could create a 2011 version of the parish hall.  A virtual combination of an Episcopal Facebook of members combined with an Episcopal Linked-In for the mission and ministry work of the church.

In our virtual parish hall we can hang out and talk with our friends and much more.  We can participate, do our mission and ministry work, collaborate and share ideas, offer our time and talent and connect with those who need them, do Bible study or be part of support groups tailored to our needs as part of “safe” place” we can always go to be at home together.

Imagining the church as a social network of the body of Christ does not, in the slightest, diminish the historic role or purpose of the church. We are merely adapting the technology of our lives to do the work of the church.  Our lives today are full of disruptive technology, mobility, going off to college, moving for a new job, joining the military, getting transferred, retiring, losing a loved one, feeling alone.  Each life event or change modifies the rhythms of our lives and at each life stage we need the love and support of the church and the entire body of Christ to live into God’s plan for us.

We’re learning from our experience with them that social networks do not isolate us or diminish our personal relationships—quite the opposite—they enrich them, intensify them and share them in ways we scarcely thought possible.  Making the church accessible, empowering and a place to be part of something exciting in the lives of people we care about and those far distant we can help.

I have God with me every day, everywhere—why can’t I take the church  too? 

Because the church grew from the congregations up, it is tough for us to transfer our communities and familial ties to the greater church as a top down organization.

It follows then that as the congregations and parishes of the church struggle, age, decline and fail so does the larger church. The church as the social place we use to connect to others has been superseded by social media, tweets, TXTs and real-time communications.

Here are real examples of the enabling power of social networking in our mission and ministry:

 

  • Making Youth Ministry Cool Again.  Is your congregation struggling to keep youth ministry exciting enough to attract the kids you want to serve?  Most parishes face this reality.  Maintaining a traditional approach to youth ministry is getting tougher and even large congregations have trouble getting a critical mass of kids at each age grouping to have a youth ministry programs that is active, exciting and cool enough to compete with the other options our kids have today.  It does not mean we should quit trying, but it does mean we should try different ways to meet the need.  Let’s face it, hiring a youth minister for the Diocese of California is not likely to be very effective when the need in the pews is spread across 80 congregations.  But those 80 congregations lack the critical mass of kids and can’t afford the resources to hire a full time youth minister.
  • Episcopal Charities Action Networks.  We learned a lot in the first round of action network grants for ministries in each of the six deaneries of the Diocese.  We learned that many congregations are supporting the same causes while others go wanting.  We learned that the needs are wider than the squeaky wheel of causes that we have known for years, still support but are going through the motions.  We also learned that the church process was too cumbersome, too long and didn’t focus enough on recruiting the faithful to many causes instead of the narrow-casting process of giving a small grant to one final winner.  Life does not work that way.  There is room at God’s table for many hands, many hearts a fire, and many mouths that need to e fed.  EC Action network is a good strategy we should perfect to be the Jobs Board of the Episcopal Church recruiting the faith to good causes.
  • Dougherty Valley Mission Collaboration.  As part of our 50th anniversary celebration St Timothy’s committed to planting a mission church to maintain its unbroken chain of faith begun when God called St Paul’s Walnut Creek through the Bishop to plant a mission congregation down the road in the San Ramon Valley.  Now we are working collaboratively with St. Clare’s and St. Bartholomew’s Livermore to identify the mission and ministry needs of a fast emerging new community in the 25,000 homes being developed in the Dougherty Valley area of SE Contra Costa and Southern Alameda Deaneries.  If we had a social network in place it would make it so much easier to spread the word to the congregations and the wider Diocesan community and use the ECN platform to introduce ourselves to the people of the Dougherty Valley.

From looking for new technology, new ideas, new ways to do church while not letting go of our tradition and ritual and history and joy at being part of the Body of Christ even if we tweet the good news, or invite a new friend to join us in a youth program by posting it on our Facebook wall.  At Pentecost we heard the Good News in many voices, many tongue and today we’re are trying to make every day Pentecost for someone seeking Christ in their lives and a way to connect to a faith community that can help them along that journey.

We need an Episcopal Social Network that helps us bring out the best in us, that informs us of new ways to serve and new needs that cry out for help, that empowers us to action rather than telling us to sit down and be quiet.  By putting us to work doing the work of the church, the church is doing more to enliven and enrich our spiritual lives than all the marketing brainpower on Madison Avenue.

We are the Episcopal Church but we need new tools and new ways to discover each other anew and to be connected as the Body of Christ in thousands of ways each day with tens of thousands of hands at work.  The church will grow when the joy in the hearts of the faithful grows from one simple act of kindness, faith and renewal multiplied like loaves and fishes thousands of times in the hearts of those we touch in God’s name.

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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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