How strategically are you thinking about social media? Be encouraged to let others know about your local church’s web site, sermons, and your pastor’s blog. Facebook offers an ideal place to get the word out.
I wasn’t around when our church decided to get a telephone. But I know churches, and I can promise you getting a phone required several long meetings, some discussion, and a little controversy. In the first place, a phone requires an ongoing expenditure. That would have raised some eyebrows. Further, our church had survived decades without a phone. Why did we suddenly need a phone? And some were no doubt concerned about what it meant from a ministry point of view. Would phone calls replace personal interaction?
Similar discussions were held many times in local churches, whether it involved the church getting indoor plumbing, installing parking places, getting electricity, using microphones, or getting an electric organ. But churches that survived (and not all did) have always been willing to think creatively and shrewdly about how to move forward for Christ.
Of course, never have there been more changes then we have seen in the last 10 years. When I began as the pastor of our church in 2005, our church did not have a web site. I remember one our flock suggesting that I watch something on Youtube, and I had never heard of Youtube. I had no idea what a “blog” was and none of us had heard anything about Twitter or Facebook. Yet all these things are here to stay, in one form or another, and churches that are going to survive must accommodate them and leverage them.
It is amazing really. Our church now has a web site (www.theredbrickchurch.org) on which you can listen to our sermons. Indeed, we have upgraded our account so that we can upload more sermons and retain them on the site. We have dozens of pictures which people can look at anywhere in the world. I have this blog and because of www.christianity.com there are online videos of me answering questions of interest which have been viewed thousands of times. The last time I looked, there had been around 250,000 page views on my web site, from people all over the world. For the first time ever, we offered online registration for Vacation Bible School.
Yet, it is not enough for us to simply have an online presence. We need to leverage that presence and take full advantage of our opportunities to share and proclaim Christ. There are myriad ways you can help us do this together.
- Visit our church web site (www.theredbrickchurch.org) and my blog (www.chrisbrauns.com). If there is something of interest, share it with someone else.
- Like your church web site on Facebook or share links through social media. Many of you have dozens and even hundreds of contacts on Facebook.
- Subscribe to my blog by email (see the upper right hand corner of my blog), or subscribe by RSS feeds if you know how to do that.
- Suggest a sermon to someone via the Internet.
This was the topic of my class yesterday evening. I showed this short clip on social media designed by Erik Qualman (Socialnomics author/speaker). Whenever I show this to students, they want the link to it. It is pretty astonishing. As he says, “It’s not whether we do social media. It’s how well we do social media.”