Facebook’s popularity and your church’s social media strategy

Facebook is popular.

Seems rather inane to state it like that, but a lot of people don’t know what to make of Facebook. Some don’t even know what Facebook is. Facebook’s incredible growth over the past year has far reaching implications not only for how people spend time online, but also how people interact in their daily lives. And this, in turn, affects the way we as the church operate. So the question is: how does a church make heads or tails of this bellwether of social media?

Since this article is long (1860 words, at last count), let me tell you where I’m going to go with this.

• First, we’ll try to understand the magnitude of growth that Facebook is experiencing.
• Then we’ll look at the factors that have contributed to this growth.
• I’ll present an interpretation of why Facebook is popular that should change the way churches approach it.
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Considerations for developing a Business as Mission strategy

I just received an email from David Skews of EDP in the UK describing an upcoming conference taking in the UK. The event is being coordinated by Pray4BaM both of which he described in his email -

Pray4BaM.org is part of a UK based charity that was set up to support Business as Mission in prayer, finance and marketing. We felt God calling us to organise a Prayer Conference for BaM. Rather than being a time of teaching about BaM, this is to be a Prayer Conference, supported by times of worship and testimony of what God is doing around the world through business.

National Church Goer Conference ’09

Hey Where’s My Conference?!?!

This is a good guest post over at ChurchCrunch.com by Eric Jones of Jonese.us.

Why aren’t there conferences for Joe the Churchgoer? Not a very easy question to answer. There’s good discussion in the comments of the original post. My response is too long to include there so I’m dedicating a post to it. Here I go:

Before kings

I am very excited to see this story from the Dallas News.

Barrington is an amazing Kingdom company based out of Dallas with a manufacturing facility in China. I was blessed to get to know them last year and help a little bit as the worked through some organizational development challenges. Here’s how the Dallas News describes Barrington:

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Have you ever seen a broken heart?

In life, in missions, in business it’s important to be reminded why it is that you do what you do. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to work out of my house and it’s a wonderful motivator to be able to spend time during the day with my amazing family. When I was leading strategic research projects for Fortune 500 companies, the highlight of the engagement was always to see the client face to face and to provide new insight into their business challenges. As an Elder of my church it is an honor to sit and tearfully bring praise and pleading before the Lord with the men and women I worship with.

As the body of Christ we are Christ’s envoys to the world today. His rescue mission is our rescue mission. Tonight I got a first hand look at a broken, shriveled, and hardened heart. The kind of heart that only the pure and perfect love of Jesus can heal.

Matthew 6:34

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

–Marcel Proust

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