THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MEDIA

From the archives of Ed Stetzer's blog comes this thoughtful article.

I recently wrote an article called "The Blessings of the New Media" for Tabletalk Magazine. I shared four ways that social media can assist churches and leaders.
The first way is community:

Those who attempt to find community exclusively online will miss out on the fullness and authenticity of relationships God intends for us to have face to face. Gathering together (Heb. 10:25) requires feet and faces, not just electrons and avatars. Therefore, when a Christian seeks to be a part of a local church only by live streaming the worship service and conversing on message boards, he is short-circuiting the fellowship of the saints and his own spiritual growth. Yet, I do not believe that virtual community and real community are enemies. I see them more as friends, the former as a help to the latter. Unfortunately, for too many theologically-minded pastors, their aversion to the abuses of social media has distracted them from the opportunity they provide.
While social media cannot replace real-life interpersonal relationships, they can assist in building real community by connecting people in ways that allow them to share both the big and small things of life. Web services such as Facebook allow people who might see one another only during church on Sunday, or midweek in smaller community groups, to continue to share aspects of life they would not otherwise. This allows friends to look into the parts of life we share and respond with encouragement or exhortation.

The second way is communication. As I said in the article, the age of the bulletin may not have completely passed, but these days people rely on so many other forms of communication to stay abreast of current events. The speed with which news can travel using social media is nothing short of amazing. For example, when my friend Matt Chandler had a seizure last year and I sent a tweet asking for prayers, the "re-tweet" function had the request going out to huge numbers of people within minutes. Matt was a trending topic on Twitter that day, which means that he was one of the ten most mentioned phrases or words in all of Twitter. People all over the world knew about his situation and prayed for Matt thanks to Twitter (note his name in the lower right corner).

The final two ways listed are inspiration and better introductions. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter all provide ways to share inspiring thoughts and gospel-centered messages (often in 140 characters or less!). And social media also allows people to share things about themselves more fully and with a broader group of people. We are actually getting to know each other better in some ways through the use of electronic media.
These things can never take the place of human contact, but to ignore them and the role they can play in fostering community is unwise. They are helpful tools that the world is using, and that the church can benefit from.

As I consider social media in the twenty-first century, I can't help but think of the spread of the gospel and the church's growth in the first century. Communication was greatly aided then by the common language of Koine Greek. Since the New Testament was written in a language accessible to so many, the Word of God was able to penetrate different cultures rapidly. Perhaps today the new media will be the "common language" for the masses to hear the gospel.

Tabletalk is a publication of Ligonier Ministries.

INTERNET MINISTRY - WHEN'S THE BEST TIME TO PUBLISH A BLOG

This came to me via Glenn Smith of NEW CHURCH INITIATIVES. It's a blog post by Dan Zarrella called "When's the Best Time to Publish a Blog?" For those of us who use blogging as a means of outreach and dialogue with our community, it has some helpful thoughts.  Here are just a few, - Steve

First, while major news sites and blogs publish articles during the work week, articles that are published on Saturday and Sunday tend to be shared on Facebook more than those published during the week. Perhaps one reason for this is that (as Wired reported), more than 50% of American companies block Facebook at work ...

The best timing advice, however, may actually be around frequency. Last week, I analyzed 1000 of the most popular blogs on the web, according to Technorati. I compared their posting frequency with the number of incoming links and visitors they had attracted (according to Yahoo and Compete). I found that among very popular blogs, publishing multiple times per day led to a huge increase in a blog’s success. This tells us that rather than focusing one perfect day or time, we should aim to publish at many times, and on many days ....

To read the rest of this excellent post go to HUB SPOT

ANDY CROUCH ON THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT CULTURAL TRENDS OF THE PAST TEN YEARS

 Note from Steve: As we begin this new \year, outward-focused churches need to do some culyutal exegesis.  Andy Crouch provides these thoughts on Q-IDEAS THAT CREATE A BETTER WORLD.

Editor's Note: Because there is no year 0, a decade runs from 01/01 - 12/10 . As we enter the second decade of the second millennium AD, Q is pausing to consider the most significant changes and cultural goods of the last ten years.  Other contributors to this series include Margaret Feinberg, Brett McCracken and Josh Jackson.
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Ten years is a very short time. As I reflect on the world in 2011 compared to the world in 2001, I’m less struck by how much has changed than by how much is the same. Terror, war, new technology, economic boom and bust, surprising political triumphs followed by sudden changes of fortune—yup, sounds like the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and 1960s to me. It’s almost axiomatic that any change big enough to shape an entire nation or society happens in long waves spanning generations, not a mere ten years.

Indeed, when I reflect on the most significant developments of the never-adequately-named 2000s (the aughts? the aughties? the naughties?), it seems that almost all of them were well under way in 1999, or even 1989. At the same time, in the last ten years some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. Acceleration matters. In one sense, walking, riding a horse, driving a car, and traveling by plane are simply variations on the millennia-old human theme of mobility, tracing back literally to the earliest signs of our restless race. But the difference between five miles an hour and 500 miles an hour is not just a quantitative matter of speed, but a qualitative change in the horizons of possibility.

Here are ten significant trends in North American culture that accelerated dramatically in the 2000s—almost always for better and for worse at the same time.

One | Connection

By far the most significant acceleration was in our technologies of connection. In June 2000, 97 million mobile phone subscribers existed in the United States; in June 2010, the number rose to 293 million. Urban and suburban Americans swim in a sea of WiFi (sitting in my living room on a quiet side street I can see 8 wireless networks)—and in the middle of Nebraska, you can get online at McDonald’s.

What did not take off in the 2000s was “virtual reality”—a world constructed entirely of disembodied bits, populated by avatars and existing only in the realm of the ideal. As the 2000s ended, the virtual-reality world Second Life was on virtual life support.

Instead, we used technology to reinforce our embodied relationships. Facebook was the highest trafficked website in 2010 (US subscribers in 2000: zero; in 2010: 116 million). Look at your Facebook friends—unless you are a celebrity, the vast majority of them are people you have met in the flesh. Same with the recents on your cell phone. Rather than replacing embodied connection, our devices supplemented and extended it, an electromagnetic nervous system to match the physical infrastructure of transport built in the twentieth century.

Two | Place

Therefore, oddly enough after a decade of wild growth in invisible telecommunications, place mattered more in 2010 than it did in 2000. Travel and transport remained basically flat throughout the decade. Total vehicle miles driven, while an impressive 3 billion miles in 2010, were only up from 2.7 billion miles in 2000, a period during which the population increased from 288 to 318 million—meaning the average American drove less in 2010 than in 2000. At 9:45 tomorrow morning there will be roughly 4,500 commercial flights in the air, just as there were on 9:45 the morning of 11 September 2001—no change despite a decade of economic and population growth. And mobility, the hallmark of twentieth-century United States culture, declined throughout the decade and reached a post-war low in 2010, with less than 10% of American households changing their address.

At the Q gathering in 2010, urbanologist Richard Florida observed that young adults meeting one another no longer ask, “What do you do?” They ask, “Where do you live?” More and more people will change careers in order to stay in a place—connected to family, friends, and local culture—than will change place to stay in a career. The 20th-century American dream was to move out and move up; the 21st-century dream seems to be to put down deeper roots. This quest for local, embodied, physical presence may well be driven by the omnipresence of the virtual and a dawning awareness of the thinness of disembodied life.

Three | Cities

Cities, the places where both connection and local presence can thrive simultaneously, had an extraordinary renaissance in the 2000s. The revival of American cities was underway already in 2000, but it reached its full flowering by 2010. Of course not every single American city flourished in the last decade, but those of us old enough to remember New York, Chicago, Atlanta, or Houston circa 1990—not to mention Portland, Columbus, or Phoenix—can only be astonished at the way economically fading and often crime-ridden city centers revived as centers of commerce and creativity.

The challenges often associated with urban life, meanwhile, began a movement to the suburbs that may well accelerate in the 2010s. The frontiers of justice, mercy, compassion, and reconciliation are now in the suburbs—places where connections are harder to sustain and local culture is thinner and less appealing than the cities. Some suburban environments will reinvent themselves, but multi-generational poverty, crime, and gangs that provide a substitute social network where others have failed are already as common in Westchester County as in the Bronx, in the San Fernando Valley as in Compton. The really radical and difficult place to raise a family by 2020 will be . . . the suburbs.

[See Tim Keller's Q talk on "Grace and the City" and Joel Kotkin's on "The Future of the Suburbs."]

Four | The End of the Majority

Everywhere in the 2000s, cultural majorities collapsed. Predominantly black neighborhoods became half Hispanic. White rural communities saw dramatic immigration from Asia and Latin America. City centers became internationalized. Mercados and Asian food markets sprung up in suburbia and in exurbia (drive down a thoroughfare well beyond the 285 beltway in Atlanta, and you will see shop signs in a dozen different languages). White Americans were still a bare majority of the population by the end of the decade, but in delivery rooms they were already only a plurality (the largest of many minorities).

We are all minorities now. Evangelical Christians are a minority, as are liberal Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists. The establishment of Will Herberg’s 1955 book Protestant—Catholic—Jew is now a minority. Barack Obama is a minority, but so is Sarah Palin. Republicans are a minority—so are Democrats, and so are independents.

There may never have been a society in history that was as culturally, religiously, and politically diverse as the United States is today—except perhaps the Roman Empire. There are few models for how such a diverse community can sustain itself, and plenty of models for failure. Perhaps the most hopeful model is a community that arose at the edges of that Empire and eventually spread to its heart, among whom there was neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.

Five | Polarity

We used the technologies of connection and the commitment to place to sort ourselves into more and more tightly homogenous subcultures, refuges both virtual and real from the heterogeneity of our society. Republicans became more Republican; Democrats became more Democratic. Salon lost ground to the Huffington Post—CNN lost ground to Fox News. A president elected on the premise of unity presided over two years of ever-sharper rhetoric of division and seemed unable to change the game. Hipsters got more extremely hip. The Reformed became truly Reformed.

It was not at all clear, as polarization accelerated, that anyone could convince any large number of Americans that they had anything crucial in common.

Six | The Self Shot

When movie directors in the 2030s are trying to convey in a single glance that their scene is set in the 2000s, they will use the self shot—the self-portrait shot from a digital camera or cell phone held by one hand extended away from the subject. We look out at our own hand, perhaps squeezing another friend into the frame, composing our face in a smile or a laugh. We are shooting ourselves.
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The visual presentation of the self accelerated in the 2000s. Previous generations saw themselves most often in mirrors. But mirrors do not show us what others see—they show us a mirror image with right and left reversed. The difference is subtle but real, and symbolic of a deeper reality. Now most 20-year-olds have seen thousands of images of themselves as others see them. In the 2000s we learned to shape and groom our image for public consumption. Body modification—augmentation, reduction, smoothing, straightening, whitening, tanning, not to mention tattooing—became normative. The closing years of the decade gave us the word “manscaping.” Enough said.

Seven | Pornography

Underneath it all was porn. Pornography is as old as visual art, but in the 2000s it was more ubiquitous than it had been since the ancient Greeks erected herms at every crossroads. Superimposed on every image of our own bodies, and the bodies of our friends and lovers, were the idealized bodies of pornography and its close cousin, advertising and popular culture, which differ from porn only in not consummating the voyeuristic impulses they arouse.

And yet as omnipresent as porn was, it remained underground—a subject of shame even among the most secular and urbane. Our culture seemed to draw back from the brink at the same time as it plunged into the abyss. The bestselling memoir was titled Eat, Pray, Love, not, Eat, Pray, F@#k. No one really wanted the culture of porn to become a runaway train. But neither was anyone sure how to stop it.

Eight | Informality

Men untucked their shirts. Billionaires wore jeans. The most powerful CEO in America was universally known as “Steve.” Indeed, informality was now a sign of privilege—only low-status workers wore uniforms. And the ubiquity of the camera meant that everyone—including celebrities, politicians, business leaders, people who in past decades would have been insulated by privilege—was caught off guard, meaning that status now accrued to those who could be most artfully informal, rather than those who could protect themselves from view.

Most institutions, with layers of tradition and deference accumulated over years, struggled to stay relevant to an informal culture. Tie-wearing network news anchors were eclipsed by cable-channel comedians with open collars. Journalistic codes of integrity and objectivity looked simply foolish next to the raw data of The Smoking Gun and Wikileaks. Marriage, with its vows and formal attire, became for many young people a distant aspiration far on the horizon, while cohabitation became the accepted gateway to adult relationships. A crippling blow was dealt to the cultural legitimacy of the oldest institution of all, the Roman Catholic Church, not by sexual abuse per se (almost all the cases reported had happened at least a decade earlier) but by the realization of how its hierarchy had covered up the scandal. The most informal and anti-institutional demographic cohort in a century, Generation X, moved uneasily and unsteadily into adulthood—symbolized neatly by its most celebrated religious movement, the emerging church, refusing to institutionalize at all and naming the leader of its most prominent organization a “coordinator.”

Nine | Liquidity

Wealth was ever more disconnected from real assets. Countries that pumped one particular liquid from the ground acquired vast resources of sovereign wealth that went looking for high returns. The most storied and prominent financial firm, Goldman Sachs, ended its century-long system of limited partnership and become a publicly traded company. Hedge funds made billions by trading not shares, but shares of bets on the future price of shares (and derivatives far more exotic). Your mortgage, once the most boring and staid of financial instruments, was sliced and diced into tranches of risk.

Money sloshed around the globe like quicksilver (the title of Neal Stephenson’s epic 2003 novel about the earliest moments of modernity). It sloshed beyond the borders of nations, of national regulators and politicians, quickly breaching the levees of international financial standards like Basel 1 (replaced by Basel 2, soon to be replaced by the soon-to-be-swamped Basel 3). Anyone unwilling to swim in the sea of liquidity drowned (or, as one Wall Street executive said, as long as the music was playing you had to keep dancing). As money sloshed, prices of oil, food, housing, and labor spiked, then collapsed, then threatened to spike again. Those who could trade on volatility often made untold fortunes; those actually needing to buy and sell real goods often suffered.

Ten | Complexity

There was a bull market in oversimplification, and no shortage of attempts to find someone to blame or, more hopefully, some way to make a difference. At the close of the decade some Christians were especially excited about the potential for cultural elites to change the world—just at the moment when elites everywhere were waking up to how little they could do to change anything at all. If there ever had been reliable levers of power—the Federal Funds Rate, Fashion Week, the New York Times bestseller list, the Nobel Peace Prize—they no longer carried much leverage in a world of countless connections, devolved into countless particular locations and conurbations, filled with fractious and fissiparous minorities, and ceaseless self-preoccupied informality. It was not a good time, to say the least, to be a central planner.

Yet all this complexity also contained the seed of certain kinds of promise. The human brain, after all, is also complex, interconnected, embodied, improvisational, constantly being rewired—simply put, the most complex system known in our universe. The culture of North America in the 2000s took several not inconsiderable steps toward having those same qualities. Not without risks, not without loss, and with every expectation of grave difficulty ahead. And yet in the most surprising places what was emerging could be called intelligence. Of course, intelligence needs to be married to wisdom—and in surveying the history of that most elusive of all cultural goods, we can only conclude that the 2000s left us neither worse nor better off than human beings have ever been.

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In your opinion, did Andy miss something? What would be on your list?

PARTNERING WITH THE SCHOOLS

There was a time when the churches were the center of the community. Except for the rarest of situations, the school has supplanted the church as that center.  The school, between families with kids in school and those who pay taxes to support it to people who follow their sports teams, has a profound shaping effect upon the community.  Recognizing this reality, my congregation has been prompted by the Holy Spirit to include this statement in our vision as a church in mission.

"We believe God wants us to partner with our schools in every way to influence children and youth for Jesus Christ."

To fullfill this our church has created a youth center with two days drop-in center programs for Middle Schools and High School.  We have made our church available as the practice site for the Junior Cheerleaders. Persons from our church volunteer in the schools building relationships and providing needed services to help the school.  We now provide leadership for an on campus student Bible study.  We sponsor two Good News Clubs at the nearest elementary schools. We are careful to be respectful to the boundaries necessary in schools to avoid church and state conflicts, the we make no secret that we do what we do because God wants us to be the best church for our community. We hope people will be open to our help spiritually as they recognize the need.

Recently I attended a meeting of our local ministerium and the Vice President for Student Services of our local school, the Hempfield School District.The schools need tutoring volunteers, parent advocacy and education programs, clearing houses for needy families physical concerns.  We are actively engaged in helping netwrok to meet those needs.  We are now helping sponsor a dialogue between the schools' leadership and the religious leadership of the community of how the churches can assist with basic human services that would normally cost schools budget monies in these fiscally stressed times.  Our Christmas offering was for the school's Good Neighbor Fund, which the Office of Student Services used to help families who financial emergencies cannot be met in other ways.

One of the thoughts that came to my mind is that our church could help the school disseminate important information to the community and to help us do our planning in a way that we could make good use of the resource that is the school. Also to avoid unnecessary conflicts when our parents are pulled one way and the church wants to pull them our way.  We have now added the website for the school district to the links section of our church web site and to our church blog. You can see these by going to our web site CHURCH OF GOD OF LANDISVILLE or to our blog BEING THE BEST CHURCH FOR THE COMMUNITY.
Trust me, the school officials were delighted at our offer.

Schools are understandably concerned when churches simply try to get into the schools to advance the goals of the church, especially when churches seem unconcerned with the perceived needs of the schools.  But we believe that churches who seem themselves as partners with the schools can benefit the entire community and remind the community that the work of Jesus is not a threat, but an enhancement.

From Igniter Media comes this imaginative description of how Joseph and Mary would have shared the story of the Nativity had a social network existed in their day.
 

SIX TURN-OFFS FOR CHURCH VISITORS

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6 Turn offs for church visitors posted by Cliff from The Gospel Blog.com.

ChurchSync Doesn't Turn Visitor's Off

Many churches go to great lengths in order to welcome church visitors. I’m sure that we all want people to feel comfortable when they attend our churches. Even though we often mean well, we have a tendency to turn off or turn away some people with our actions.

1. Visitors are asked to stand up and make a speech.Research has shown that most people do not like to stand up and talk in front of groups, especially when this is a group of people they don’t know.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before: “Will all visitors please stand.”

Talking in front of the whole church may seem very common to most of us. However, this is a completely new concept for someone who is unchurched.

2. No one welcomes them at the door.
In my opinion, people that don’t normally attend church expect church people to be friendly. Church visitors should at least be met with a “good morning” or “hello” and a smile. I don’t think that is too much to ask. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen.

In many churches, it is not uncommon for a visitor to walk in and take their seat without ever being greeted.

3. They get placed in a “bad” seat.
We all know that there are certain people that we would rather not sit next to in church. Most of the time it is because these people talk too much during service.

Attention ushers! Let’s try to do a better job at making sure that visitors and guests do not sit next to these people. It is hard for any visitor to enjoy the service if the person next to them is constantly talking.

4. No child care
More and more churches have special accommodations for children. This is a huge factor when people are selecting a new church to attend.

5. Nobody talks to them after church
I’ve seen this plenty of times. A visitor sits through an entire service and leaves at the end without anyone saying anything to them. Your church may be a wonderful and supportive family, but people will never know it if nobody greets them after church.

6. Follow-up caller is pushy
Many churches have visitors fill out information cards. A day or two after the service a member of the church calls to follow-up with the visitor.

Instead of being friendly and pleasant, some people treat this like a sales call. They try to close a deal for Jesus and hard sell a person into making a return visit to the church.

We can offer all of the free coffee and gift packets we want. Nothing can substitute positive or negative human interaction. When people visit your church, it is important to give them the most positive and pleasant experience possible.

What do you think? Have you encountered any turn off when you visited another church?

NEAL COLE ON THE CHURCH AS A LIVING SYSTEM