THE GOSPEL AND SOCIAL MEDIA

"The Gospel and Social Media"

"It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it." - Isaiah 55:11, New Living Translation

I can remember back in the 1980's when personal computers began to be a tool embraced by local pastors engaged in the practice of ministry. Up until then, I tended to focus on communicating from a traditional pulpit or some formal teaching venue. I had already begun writing, being published in our denominational magazines, with my IBM Selectric as my tool of choice. The former required people to be sufficiently attracted to me or to the topic to make the effort to come into my sanctuary or classroom to hear what I had to share. The latter depended on a magazine and the aggressiveness of the circulation department to get my message out to those who needed to hear it. (Given the editing and publication process, this was rarely current or timely.)

A revolution has occurred in the world of communication and "publication." It has been generated by the Internet. Now blogs, web sites, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts facilitate the spread of your message in ways unimaginable.

I have 545 friends on my Facebook account, each of which has an average of at least 200 friends. I publish eight blogs that are syndicated by a Facebook tool called Networked Blogs. Each time I publish, those posts appear on my profile page and arrive via news feed to my "friends." If you do the math of the numbers earlier in this paragraph, you will know that there is a potential of 109,000 readers for any of those things that I publish. That does not count those who subscribe to those blogs via Blogger or Wordpress, or who capture an RSS feed. A number of those blogs have links on my church web site and my local conference's web site and that gives access to other people who might be visiting those sites. Several of my blogs receive between 50-100 visits per day.

Then there are the search engines for Word Press and Google, who send people to my blogs - particularly my general blog published on both Word Press and Blogger called Life Matters.

I am now being encouraged to add a Twitter link to several of these blogs.
On any given Sunday I preach to between 175-225 people. In the classes I lead, there are maybe another 15-20 (not all weekly). The potential for the Gospel remains somewhat static in these traditional contexts, but with the advent of these internet and social media tools--the potential multiplies and multiplies and multiplies.

Why wouldn't we embrace the technology? It's a no-brainer.

I originally posted this February 10, 2011 on DEEPER EVANGELISM, the blog for the School of Evangelism for the Eastern Region Conference of the Churches of God.