Gospel.com Blog

The day one of my parents’ peers requested to be my friend on facebook I knew that social networking was here to stay. There’s something about connecting with each other that just makes sense, even for people who five years ago would barely take a second glance at a computer.

For those that do participate in social networks, I’d like to ask you: has social networking had a positive impact on your faith?

What do you think?

If I were to go to your Facebook page, what would I see listed under “Religious Views”?

Defining your “Religious Views” can be a deceptively complicated experience. Many people aren’t comfortable with labeling themselves so succinctly, because taking on a label often means taking on all the connotations of that label. You might understand what it means to be “Baptist” or “Catholic,” but do all of your acquaintances and friends? Will they in turn label you as a nutcase if you say you’re “Presbyterian?” Should you care if they look at you askance for being “Anglican?”

A recent conversation on the definition of the term ‘evangelical’ comes to mind (see this Jesus Creed post if you’re interested in exploring that). Nowadays, the word “Evangelical” carries some very unchristian baggage along with it in some people’s minds.

A Washingtonpost.com article, Soul-Searching on Facebook, provides some insight into the thought process that goes into the “Religious Views” question:

Creating a Facebook profile for the first time, Eric Heim hadn’t expected something so serious. Hunched over his laptop, he had whipped through the social network Web site’s questionnaire about his interests, favorite movies and relationship status, typing witty replies wherever possible. But when he reached the little blank box asking for his core beliefs, it stopped him short.

“It’s Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?” said Heim, 27, a college student from Dumfries. “But a question like that kind of makes you think.”
[...]
Of its 250 million users worldwide, Facebook says more than 150 million people choose to write something in the religious views box.

Later in the article Piotr Bobkowski, a doctoral student at UNC, talks about his research:

He has found that a significant portion of privately religious young adults — almost a third in the case of Protestants — avoid identifying themselves by their traditional sects.

Many teens, Bobkowski said, prefer to portray themselves as spiritual but not religious: “That’s why you see all these little one-line creeds popping up.”

What about you? What does your Facebook profile say your religious views are? Do you think there’s good reason for religious people to tiptoe around labels?

Could your internet knowledge make a difference in your local community? The Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has declared September 14-21 Mozilla Service Week. The idea is simple: during that week, we all look for concrete ways that internet knowledge or skills can be put to work in the service of our local communities.

Here are some of the examples they provide:

• Teach senior citizens how to use the Web.
• Show a non-profit how to use social networking to grow its base of supporters.
• Help install a wireless network at a school.
• Create Web how-to materials for a library’s computer cluster.
• Refurbish hardware for a local computer center.
• Update a non-profit organization’s website.
• Teach the values of the open Web to other public benefit organizations.

As you can see, you don’t have to be an expert coder or a seasoned computer engineer to help out.

I think this is a wonderful idea—and easily translatable into a ministry environment. Who do you know in your community who could use some internet-related help? What local ministries or organizations could you help by donating a few hours of time upgrading software or training their staff? If you’re reading this blog post, chances are you have the skills to help a person or organization in your community in some way.

I note that UrbanMinistry.org has already jumped on this—take a look at their virtual volunteer opportunities, and think about how you or your church might get involved in a virtual service project this September.

Earlier this month, Out of Ur hosted an interesting conversation about the advantages and drawbacks of “internet campuses” for churches. (When you read the post, be sure to check out the excellent discussion in the comments as well.) But what really caught my attention this week was Bob Hyatt’s post arguing that there is no such thing as a virtual church.

Hyatt’s point is a compelling one, and puts words to the vague unease that many Christians (even the most tech-savvy ones!) have about the role of online churches and worship communities. Hyatt’s argument is that while an online church community can reproduce many of the things that define a true church, they simply cannot replicate the low-key but critical face-to-face interaction from which real, everyday Christian ministry springs.

At an online church, Hyatt argues, you’ll never hear Bob Churchgoer gripe about his difficult work week, or Jane Choirmember recount her ongoing struggle with migraines. And without those little interactions, we’d miss out on countless small opportunities to serve others and meet their needs (maybe inviting Bob out for coffee to relax, or volunteering to watch Jane’s kid next time a migraine knocks her out of commission.)

I almost agree with Hyatt… almost.

At this point in my life, online church isn’t for me, for many of the reasons Hyatt describes. I think Hyatt would be correct if he were arguing that few or no online churches active right now can replicate the intimate fellowship that happens in a face-to-face church, with all the Christian encouragement and ministry that spring out of such things.

But I’m not comfortable saying that online church can never meet those needs. I don’t know about you, but I’ve encountered plenty of online forums—not even Christian or church-related ones–where people share the same everyday gripes, praises, and pleas that they would in a face-to-face environment. This might be an indictment of my poor socialization at church, but I actually learn as much about prayer needs and praise reports through Facebook as I do from the post-service cookies-and-coffee break where most congregational chatting takes place.

There are many things an online community would have to do to (some of them quite difficult) to create an environment of authentic fellowship, but I don’t see any reason why it’s impossible. I can think of several reasons why it could actually be a good idea—for one thing, you can’t have been on the internet at any point in the last ten years and failed to notice that people tend to open up online about their ideas, opinions, and problems in ways that they might rarely do face-to-face.

So while I sympathize with much of Hyatt’s concerns, I’m a little unsure whence comes his insistence that virtual church is a complete spiritual dead-end. A follow-up post is promised, so I’ll be watching Out of Ur to see where he leads the conversation. What do you think? Have you experienced genuine church worship and fellowship online?

[image from flickr user shadysidelantern]

You can’t have ventured online at any point during the last year and not read something about Twitter. It’s the latest star in the ongoing evolution of online communication, and as with any such thing, it has its share of champions and detractors. The Christian church, with its long history of using new media to spread its age-old message, is split on the issue: some Christians have embraced Twitter wholeheartedly while others have criticized it.

At Strangely Dim, Rebecca Larson chimes in with a compelling new take on the Twitter discussion: Twitter may restrict our communication to extremely brief bursts, but it’s incorrect to say that meaningful communication can’t take place through Twitter. For proof, she turns to poetry, which has long communicated important messages in short but insightful pieces.

What do you think? Those of you who use Twitter, do you see meaningful or spiritually enriching communication taking place through it? Or is Twitter the narcissistic toy its detractors claim it to be?

There’s no telling how severely, or for how long, the current economic downtown will affect giving to churches and ministries. While some experts suggest that church giving may remain stable for the near future, others are suggesting strategies for churches and ministries to adopt in anticipation of a crunch in giving.

It’s interesting to see some novel approaches to ministry fundraising in this climate. While reading through a list of online ministry tips for ministries at UrbanMinistry.org, I noticed an interesting new site that aims to help ministries raise funds by letting its supporters do the talking: MinistryAmbassadors.org.

MinistryAmbassadors lets your ministry set up a fundraising page where people can donate online to your cause, as you might expect—an idea spearheaded by sites like Fundable. But MinistryAmbassadors adds a new twist to the idea of online fundraising: anybody can put together their own fundraising page where they can sing the praises of, and raise money for, the nonprofits they love. It shifts the focus of fundraising to the people who already support your ministry, on the theory that people who are excited by your ministry will make better ambassadors for your cause than yet more fundraising letters or email appeals from the organization itself. (Note that MinistryAmbassadors retains a small portion of donations it processes, to cover the cost of the service.)

It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the concept takes off. Are your ministry’s supporters excited enough about your ministry that they’d become online ambassadors for the cause? Time will tell if the idea is sound, but regardless, it’s an intriguing effort to combine the vast reach of social networking with the age-old challenge of ministry fundraising.

There’s no shortage of Christian conferences out there to attend—there are leadership conferences, revival conferences, marriage conferences, and countless others, all aimed at cultivating your talents, relationships, or faith. But the more technologically-oriented among you might be interested in Godbit’s list of Christian tech conferences in 2009.

They list several tech conferences taking place this year that have a specific focus on the intersection of faith, evangelism, and technology. First up (in February) is the Ministry 2.0 conference, followed by BibleTech in March, Dynamic Church in May, and the Echo Conference in July. Whether you’re a veteran techie, a blogger, a church leader, or just want to explore how Christianity does and should make use of media and technology, take a look at these conferences and see if one of them is a fit for your schedule and interests.

What does your church’s online presence look like? Hopefully your church has a website, at least—and hopefully it’s one that communicates your church’s message clearly, and not a website that looks like it belongs in the past decade. But even if your church’s website needs some serious help (and even a well-designed church site needs periodic review and updates), here are a few tools to help you, all from the Internet Evangelism Day website.

• First up is a very thorough 55-question church website quiz you can take to find out how your church website is doing. The quiz isn’t meant to be a list of set-in-stone guidelines—you might disagree with a few items, or some of them might not apply to your church’s site—but walking through this quiz is a great way to make sure you’re thinking about all the right questions. Notice that plenty of the questions are strategic rather than technical; these are questions to talk through with your entire church leadership, not just with the person who designed/is designing your site.
• A good follow-up to the quiz is IED’s list of 70+ tips for effective church websites. Lots of good discussion-starters, covering both technical and strategic aspects.
• It’s important to get your church’s website working effectively for your ministry. But it would be a mistake to assume that just having a website covers all of the necessary bases of your internet presence—what about social networking, blogging, and mobile devices? The IED site has a good overview of how to incorporate social networking sites like Facebook into your church’s ministry, as well as corresponding pages on ministry blogging and mobile devices.

Don’t let your church settle for an ineffective online presence—read through these resources and see what you can apply to your church’s website and internet ministry.

Each year we at Gospel Communications run something called The Internet Ministry Conference (IMC). We consider it part of our ministry to mobolize and train those that are interested in internet ministries.

Last week Brian Atkinson visited Willow Creek and interviewed Ray Pelletier and Sam Haist for the IMC blog. Ray works as the Emerging Media & Ministry Specialist at Willow and Sam is working as an intern.

Their discussion ranged from online discipleship, to social networks, to how the church should use technology. Well worth a listen if you’re interested in how the internet is being used for the Kingdom of God:

Internet Evangelism Day is one month away. What does your church have planned?

If you’re not familiar with Internet Evangelism Day, there’s still time to learn about it and get your church community involved. Each year on IE Day (this year, it falls on April 27), churches are encouraged to focus on a massive missions field that we interact with on a daily basis, but which often goes unmentioned by the church: the internet! It’s a day for churches to educate themselves about the evangelism opportunities that the internet makes possible, and to pray for the ongoing evangelism work taking place online every day, all around the world.

If you and/or your church aren’t overflowing with technical knowledge, don’t worry—the IE Day website has some excellent, user-friendly materials available for free download to help you learn about internet evangelism and share what you know with your church community:

• An explanation of why the internet is an excellent missions field, and a discussion of whether or not internet evangelism achieves results.
• Free resources and ideas to help you set up an IE Day service at your church—anything from a full church service focused on the topic to a small group discussion. And IE Day isn’t just for churches; all Christian groups and organizations are encouraged to take some time on or around IE Day to give some thought to the ways that the internet can be used to share the Gospel.
• Strategies for making effective evangelistic websites, and for improving your church website so that it actually speaks to non-Christians.

There’s much more to explore over at the IE Day site, so take some time to look around. There’s still a month to go, so you’ve got time to plan something (big or small) for your church, small group, or ministry. Mark down April 29 on your calendar!