Facebook Fellowship & Pastoral Care

I have seen a great many poorly done church Facebook pages. I have also seen a lot of good ones. This article is about the good ones. I am going to do a single case study on how my home church uses Facebook successfully, but I'd love to hear and republish stories about churches who also have really good presence in social media.

St. Matthews Lutheran Church in North Hollywood is my home congregation, so I may be a biased. However, they have created some good practices to assist Pastoral Care and Fellowship through Facebook.

People not Places

Its called Facebook, not Place book. A Church Facebook page with your sanctuary as a profile picture might be a good idea, but that shouldn't be your entire presence on Facebook. St. Matthews has that Church page but the Pastor also has a Facebook. Moreover, Susan Wolfe the Pastor has a Facebook.

Pastor Sue's Facebook isn't just a list of church events, or posts on how successful the fundraiser was, it is her, the person. It is not a daily bible verse feed, it is her, the person. If you take a look at her page you have a combination of personal reflections, things her life, news articles, and funny videos from the Colbert Report. You get the sense that the Pastor is a real person, not some holy sage spouting verses and reflections or a church bulletin board. She becomes a palatable person.

Since that Pastor is now a human that someone can relate to, parishioners and future parishioners can get under the first layer that a visitor normally experiences. In this way the seeker is then seeing a community and simply a devotional manual or bulletin board.

The Pastor then uses the Facebook to share who they are, what thoughts are running through their heads, and most importantly how their church works in their life. A Ministerial presence on Facebook needs to be a face, not a church bulletin board or devotional manual. People need to be able to relate to the community, and by these relations they learn about Christ and the church.

So then the posts of a Pastor could look something like a mix of bible verses, funny YouTube videos, actual Facebook interaction with parishioners, and yes, maybe an update or two about how bingo night went. One might also want to make their posts something that people  are invited to comment on.

However, if its just this Pastor going on about church, the bible, their social life, or that video of a cat playing a Piano, that may be kind of weird and sad. We all know that churches are more than their pastor, they have a lot of other important people in them. So what do we do?

Facebook Ministry Team

Pastor Sue has recruited a number of People from the congregation to be a part of a Facebook ministry team. This team will do a number of various duties: add visitors on Facebook, check up on parishioners who haven't attended in a while, tout recent church events, interact with the Pastor's Facebook, but most importantly they are just average people on Facebook.

A lot of the same theory that goes behind the "Pastor's Facebook" but that this includes parishioners and helps create an online sense of congregational community. They help the Pastor in his or her ministry on Facebook by giving someone to talk and interact with, to show how the church has a real presence (no pun intended) on Facebook. It isn't just a Pastor posting stuff, instead its a Pastor and the community joining in online fellowship. They become just like any other circle of people who have Facebook.

On the other side of things, This gives people who may not be able to volunteer a lot during the week a way to participate in the church's ministry in a flexible way. It is a way to help your community feel involved in the community. Its easy to do, it requires no real technical skill.

Consider too, having your leaders create a Facebook presence. The council president, the Youth director, the Sacristan etc, could all have a Facebook presence creating a sense of an online as well as real community.

Conclusion


In short, your object is to create a vision of a real community of real people in a virtual setting. You want to create a circle. This circle gives the seeker a way to see not only the events or theology, but the real people in the community. This circle however is an open circle that gives opportunities for people who may not be in the circle.

My theory about social media, telecommunication and the real world can be described as circles. The reason people, especially teens, love social media is because it gives them a way to be constantly in contact with the circles to which they belong. So the reason a teenager may seem distant at an adult party, a cousins wedding, and even church, is because they want to be with what is comfortable and what they know. Then as a way to escape from what is uncomfortable to what is comfortable.

Your goal then is to find a way to attract the seeker and help them make this new circle their own. The miracle of the information age is it allows people to remain in contact with their circles at an unprecedented level. So therefore you need to create a new circle that people to which people want to belong. Not simply a site for updates about church events or a list of bible verses, but a community, a circle to which one wants to sit in.