Recently a LOT of our church members (adults and teens) have discovered facebook and there has been a growing community and interaction growing there (one of our pastors had a 40th anniversary party organized via facebook).
I have finally found some time to start mulling over what role our church website would have in relation to all of this activity on facebook.
Do you have any ideas or experience in using your church website to complement facebook (not replace it, no need to re-invent a perfectly well working wheel)?
Integrating images, user profiles, notes, applications, etc from/to facebook and your website.
Some good posts appeared at http://digital.leadnet.org/2007/09/churches-on-fac.html
And there are some tantalizing conference slides at http://experience.fellowshipone.com/downloads/dc08/Technology/SocialNetw...
Any other thoughts?
Comments
You may be interested in
You may be interested in this: http://drupal.org/project/fb
I suppose it would help facebook integrate your church website rather than the other way around, but maybe that's a good thing. :-)
Hostage to Facebook?
I never want any part of my ministry hostage to a non-Christian resource - that is voluntarily submitting to the authority of an unbeliever.
Your church members may be big into Facebook but you want to look really closely at how you wean them from all but evangelistic outreach there - most of not all of the MySpace, Facebook, etc. sites have an agenda that is not Bible-friendly ... or will turn on Christians in a heartbeat if profit or political correctness so dictates.
Even GodTube contains some stuff which makes me cringe.
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Agenda?
I know, I'm asking for it, but what is their agenda? Also, how can it be an evangelistic tool outside of participation in the communities it makes available?
I confess I heavily promote people over 30 in my life getting onto facebook for the express purpose of not letting another generation of children live outside of the mentorship of their elders. Facebook needs mature Christians to help guide and disciple those in need, at least that's the position I've taken. I know some questionable ad material does come up on facebook from time-to-time. I've not found a way to escape that in this world though.
I've know a couple of Dad's who got on Facebook just to hear their son's say, "Dad, I can't get away from you anywhere!"
MySpace lost my attention over the graphic nature of their advertising early on so I'm not concerned about them, but Facebook is a place I choose to frequent.
non-Christian resource
I may be asking for it but does it matter if the web resource is non-Christian? When it comes to getting power to turn on the lights in a church do we go with a Christian provider? When it comes to eating out do we only eat at places that are Christian? I'm all for the right tool for the job and not bending the church to the methods of the business world. But, I'm not seeing how a ministry would be hostage to a non-Christian resource if they use facebook.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Those of us in leadership
Those of us in leadership have to remember that we must "program" for the most vulnerable of our "sheep" - we have to be careful to not assume that everyone is as discerning or as well-defended against the wiles of the Enemy as are we. And we know that we are far from perfect ourselves!
On every non-Christian Web resources the value system promoted is not honoring to God - they are not neutral. When we link to them we, intentionally or unintentionally, are seen as implicitly endorsing that site and everything on it - after all - we directed people there.
We have alternatives, good ones, why not use them?
We could post our sermons and other videos to YouTube but then we would be encouraging our members and their friends to go there - it is an open sewer of anti-Christian values. We chose GodTube, a fine and vastly more edifying alternative.
Would we strategically post videos to YouTube as an evangelical outreach? Sure! But we'd not link it from our Church page nor would we encourage our members to view it there. We would select a couple of more mature members to monitor the post on YouTube and to respond to questions or comments.
Jesus commanded Peter to both feed and to protect His sheep. Being intentional about these choices is an important act of obedience and responsibility
IMHO, YMMV ... :-).
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Does it really protect?
I'm all for protecting the flock and I understand the situation pastors are in. Pastors are not only tasked with teaching, praying, and overseeing they are held to a certain level of accountability in that task. This is quite a daunting task.
But, if a church chooses to not use YouTube so they aren't encouraging members to go there will it stop the members from being there and interacting in that environment? If a church sets up their community site though mychurch.org rather than facebook will it stop their members who use their community site from being on facebook as well? I both of these cases the people who use the video and use the only communities will, an overwhelming majority of the time, be on the worldly sites as well. Having the church stuff segregated from the YouTubes and Facebooks of the world doesn't stop the members from being there.
So, how does a church go out and reach people in the worldly places they are at while not encouraging worldly living at the same time?
When I look at YouTube I don't see a worldly agenda in YouTube. The agenda is really to me a marketplace and grow that marketplace. The marketplace has people promoting sinful things but that's what it's like for the members of a congregation when they leave the church. They go out into the world and into places where people are promoting sinful ideas. Do we send our members to soup kitchens that aren't Christian to help people? I've been there, as a soup kitchen, when someone I was working with was promoting some sinful life choices. This happens in all the places we go in life.
Maybe a strategy we need to consider group wide is how do we prepare people for these things. This would carry over to churches as a whole. It's been measured that people in the church and people outside the church live the same lifestyles. This is a topic that needs to be addressed even outside the Internet context. Attempting to shelter the people of the Church keeps them from being out in the world doing the mission of the church. Sending them out into the world unprepared and they become the world. Neither works.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
> But, if a church chooses
Nope, but then God does not hold me accountable for your choices, only mine. If you choose to disobey God and immerse yourself in the world - which God says will bring you down - that is between you and God. I have to honor His trust as a leader and not be used by the Enemy to lead you into trouble.
Nope.
Sure doesn't - but they go there in rebellion - not due to my being used by the Enemy as a Pied Piper leading them there.
We are reading the OT in chronological order with our 11 & 13yr old children. They are shocked at the persistent rebellion of the "children of God" despite repeated bad consequences. They don't understand why the people continued to go places and do things that they knew were wrong. As it says in Ecclesiastes "there is nothing new under the sun".
Two separate ministries all too often, to the glee of the Enemy, confused and merged.
We minister to believers and seekers whom God sends to us in the safest-possible environment. Jesus did not meet with His disciples in a drug den, bar room, or whorehouse. He chose the Upper Room, as did the early church. Relatively isolated from the distracting influences of the world.
When He was about the ministry of evangelism/missions then He went into the world - visiting but not immersing there. The Bible also makes a point of the times that Jesus "went apart" to pray - we need spiritually safe places and times like that as well. We visit the world, we try not to immerse in it, most of us are not strong enough to resist the influences we find there.
The Bible teaches that Satan is the Prince of this world. We "chose" him at the time of rebellion in the Garden of Eden. The King will one day return but we must understand that everything in the world is manipulated by the Enemy to prevent salvation, and failing that, to compromise believers.
"The Screwtape Letters", Pilgrim's Progess, and "This Present Darkness" are three books which attempt to illustrate this.
Sure! Our more mature members and with the intention of being salt & light there - and only if not asked to endorse or participate in anything God says is improper - and only if one does not find it somehow a place of temptation that is getting the better of you.
It does but we don't have to volunteer to appear to be complicit in their promotion of sin when it often is not necessary. Anti-Christian forces have succeeded in some formerly-free countries in the imposition of legal prohibitions to the teaching of the entire Bible to the benefit of certain non-Biblical life choices. Here in the USA they are not only trying that but are also moving to impose the deliberately falsely named "Fairness Doctrine" which is really a "silence all but liberal worldly voices" legislation. Prophesy says that one day they will succeed in passing it and it will become illegal to speak the truth of God anywhere in the world.
BTW: There are plenty of Christian soup kitchens where you may also "earn the right to be heard" and at the same time provide an atmosphere of spiritual as well as physical health.
Intentionally chosen moments of evangelism/missions/outreach, whatever you want to call it, is not the same thing as the daily immersion of our online church culture in the things of the world. Christians need a safe place. Perhaps your church members are all stalwart saints but most of ours are very easily led astray - making it necessary for them to go "into the world" to access our church when such is not necessary is setting them up to fail.
We do that through discipleship - in places (online and physical) that are deliberately chose to be apart from the world.
As a child Jesus was once "missing" and when his parents found Him He was not hanging with the drunks and prostitutes seeking truth, He was among the elders in a place set-apart "about His Father's work" discussing the Word in a safe place.
Because we don't understand nor teach the critical difference between that which is surrendered to God and where we have legitimately taken spiritual authority and where we cannot.
Christian lifestyles are not unique not because they are isolated from the world - little evidence of that anywhere - but because they are immersed in the world with little respite even in most churches. Ritualism is not respite - spiritual safety and intentional discipleship are.
How many Christians practice "putting on the full armor of God daily"? How many can name let alone illustrated progress in living out "the fruits of the Spirit" in their daily lives? More of them can share details about sports, soap operas & so-called "reality television" shows than the Word of God. Seems to me that they need a whole lot less of the world!
Jesus prepared His disciples first then sent them. He did not send them like lambs to the wolves. We seem to have gotten the process backwards ... or simply neglected discipleship (which starts with spiritual self-discipline) entirely. :-(
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Forgive me for picking on
Forgive me for picking on one element, but if you'll permit, we can select others later to speak further on. I lose track when threads start diverging like this...
Christ example of discipleship demonstrates both separation and active ministry. He and his disciples lived among the people often, but they also had special times when they drew apart and even Jesus came apart for his own spiritual life. I'm not suggesting that the Internet replaces all of that. In fact, that would be a down-right butchering of the potential of the technology let alone a failure to truly disciple.
I am suggesting that we live our lives, as a church, in front of other people where they are. Discipleship requires opportunity to be applied and caught on top of being taught. Christ did spend time with tax collectors in their homes (the legalized thieves of the day). In fact, one of the disciples was a tax collector when he was called to follow Christ. I don't think we can say that he prepared them first, no life outside of teaching. Preparation included times of active ministry. I also don't think we can point at the disciples as the only example of valid discipleship. We know Christ had many other followers who understood and followed the truth of his teaching, but were not among the disciples. Christ just had a specific set of folks he invested in more deeply in the times he drew apart and gave more responsibility to in active ministry. These are the men we see collecting and distributing food, money and other things before they were sent out.
Also, what I think mf is saying is that in order to actually be a part of the lives of those on the fringes of our church and minister to them, we need to go find them. In my experience, this is a weakness in the American church. The people on the fringes of the church aren't being reached. If they become involved, it is because they've taken the effort to reach in. Due to geographical change, I'm currently having a problem getting involved with a church. My efforts to reach in have been taken lightly despite my clear interest in involvement. Sadly, this isn't my first time having this problem and I know I'm not alone in it. Christ and the disciples traveled to find the lost and needy. Paul traveled and God saw fit to disperse the Christians around the world through mistreatment, torture and death.
I praise God for the men who taught me skills to deal with the world through the examples of their own lives in the world. They could have talked to me about it's dangers all year from behind the walls of a church and some have, but their example is what sticks to this day and has the largest impact on making me who I am.
Some Things To Consider
You bring up some very good issues that are theological, philosophical, and technical in nature. That means this is a hot topic with a lot of opinions that take on even more flavors. There is a definite theological angle to this that's for pastors to dig into and the rest of us to respect the decision of those pastors. Pastors should know scriptures and their impact much better than the rest of us.
Pastors are, also, the responsible ones. So often we look at our roles and say we are to try and reach people and that if we don't it's not really a concern with ours. For pastors it is a concern of theirs and they are held responsible. I understand the care you take in looking at all of this. I highly respect that and hope the rest of us can take a high level of care in our decisions as well.
That being said I do think our big difference is philosophical. When I look at the YouTube and Facebooks of the world I don't see an inherently bad place. Yes, they are full of bad people doing bad things. I see it as a virtual extension of our physical world.
In this physical world we have have sheltered discussions, we have open forums and teaching, we have ministering to people who want to learn, we have outreach to people who aren't part of the church, and we bring aid to people who need it. How do these translate to the virtual world? In coming up with good web solutions for churches we need to look at and into these. This is one place where we need to have unique solutions that meet the way the church operates (theologically) to do it's thing with relation to the world.
This thread has been too much debate on the subject and not enough constructive use case gathering/solution building. In the coming weeks I'd like to explore these things further and try to come up with constructive use cases for how the church would operate virtually and then discuss drupal implementations of these. Sound good?
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Practical Application
Here is how we use GodTube: http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com/node/24
Over 17,000 views of the sermons, teaching, and special music. No way to know if they are seekers, new believers, or church leaders.
Many of our Youth and a few adults have a presence on MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. It is careless and unsupervised, not endorsed by the church & based on a cursory look from time to time the "world" seems to be dominating most of those interactions because the Christian participants are too "green" (not Al Gore green but immature green, if there is a difference) to keep themselves safe there.
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
A problem that needs to be solved
The green, as in immature Christian living, is something that is really prevalent in western culture church these days. I know exactly what you mean and I see it all the time. This green type thing isn't exclusive to their Internet personas on MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. If we met them out at a restaurant in the middle of the week or at work during their day jobs I bet we'd find the same reflection of their personalities happening. It's the notion that what you see on Facebook and YouTube is the real them and the mask they put on is how we see them in Christian circles. This is what I experience regularly.
So, this is a problem that needs a solution and much of it is outside the realm of the drupal church group. These people that we see as green online are green in their lives. It's a problem for the church right now. So, how do we solve it. And when it comes to websites, what solutions can help enable that?
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite
Matthew 22:9 says, "'Therefore go into the highways, and as many as you find, invite to the wedding.'"
Kevin McCord recently blogged that "churches should stop thinking just about their website and think about their web presence. It isn't a question of whether or not church members should
be encouraged touse Facebook. The premise of this thread is that they already are. So, how do we deal with that, and how can we make our own church sites a part of our response?If our congregation members are using Facebook and are, by their actions and associations, representing the local church, then church leadership should want to step up and play a role in that interaction. This can be as simple as creating a Facebook group and seeding the discussion forum with relatively safe topics that turn the focus onto what God is doing in the church. Our youth pastor is doing this. His posts always end with a reminder about the next upcoming event.
Which leads to my point: invite. The primary flavor for this sort of Facebook group should be invitational. Are people already on Facebook? Like it or not, they are. Then let's kick up a topic and steer them back to our own community website to discuss it.
As far as I can tell, the Facebook module can be used to create Facebook apps for reposting our own Drupal content through a Facebook app. That simplifies keeping fresh content in front of our users. Let's face it, they'll stay away from the church site and spend their time on Facebook if they know - or even think - that the content on the church site is stale or lame.
It looks like work is beginning to integrate Facebook Connect. With this, users could log in to our community site with their Facebook credentials. Maybe that lowers the barrier of entry for some, and they're more inclined to take advantage of the community features in our church websites.
Facebook and MySpace
aren'tmay not be suitable for a church's primary social network, but the congregation members already there can and should be shepherded. By doing so, these networks could be leveraged as an additional entry point to the local site, and there are modules that might help.Micah
Sounds like a very
Sounds like a very reasonable compromise to me ... so long as the church does not abandon efforts to
develop discipleship content to draw and hold those who are but should not be on Facebook, etc and those
whom they do not want drifting over there.
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Stepping back... :-) I'm
Stepping back... :-)
I'm game for digging into use cases.
First one?
Any thoughts on what the first use case we could tackle as a group could or should be?
A few that came to mind for me are:
- Education
- Church body communication
- Encouragement through the week
- Organizational collaboration (especially the distributed kind which a church body tends to be)
Thoughts?
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
I think I'd like to start
I think I'd like to start with church body communication
Another thing to look at would be using the church website as a community service (providing community event calendars, areas to discuss local issues, etc.) This simply doesn't exist otherwise in many small communities, but small rural communities also tend to be heavy with Internet users looking for something.
Building A Friendlier Drupal-Church Web Site
Education: Posting sermons, lessons, and resource links is a good place to begin. As a sometimes adjunct professor and former college administrator who has also taught a variety of church classes this is one of my favorite areas - discipleship! I'd love to see a whole curriculum of basic Bible courses on our Web site which lead to a series of certificates of recognition for accomplishment.
Church body communication: The greatest weakness of every Christian organization with whom I have interacted. As others have noted - a master calendar tied to ministry-specific calendars, blogs, forums, etc.
Encouragement through the week: Lots of this already out there but even better if "personalized" to reinforce the Sunday message and to respond to church and current events which are impacting our members.
Organizational collaboration (especially the distributed kind which a
church body tends to be): Mostly seems closely connected to "Church body communication".
HowTo for regular folk: Sure would be good to have a FAQ for the site tied to a Forum where questions may be asked and ideas offered to encourage people to explore the site and to participate in growing it.
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
agree with Matt
I tend to agree much more with Matt than David in this case, but I think that this discussion's theological turn is probably not best suited for the Drupal groups site. I agree that the topic is interesting and something that is not discussed enough. However, it seems very non-Drupal related. That's just my two cents.
-Mike Goodwin
Red Leaf Media
http://www.redleafmedia.com
The Drupal value is this:
The Drupal value is this: When we are advising churches in the construction and linking of their online resources ... is our counsel rooted in the Bible or the world?
I am a big fan of using the Internet, music, workshops, coffeehouse, food distribution, movies, VBS, community service, missions, sports, hobbies, etc. for the purpose of outreach - we do all of that and more!
My intent is to emphasize that believer discipleship and worship are not seeker-sensitive activities and never have been. The Apostle Paul was careful to define them as separate.
We need to separate the two because in the rush toward evangelism and seeker-sensitive much of the church is soaking in theological milk, meaningful discipleship has vanished, and the faith of many is paper-thin.
We show churches how to do both using Drupal - internal believer discipleship AND external seeker evangelism.
Reaching OUT and then directing seekers IN to find truth is different than reaching IN and directing believers (especially when not discriminating between vulnerable baby believers and seekers and mature disciples) OUT where they will be led astray.
Evangelism is an intentional exercise that follows discipleship and involves close supervision - Jesus modeled that for us to be certain we did not miss it - but it seems that far too many have.
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Certainly, discipleship
Certainly, discipleship isn't a seeker-sensitive activity. Certainly, faith is paper-thin due to lack of discipleship and solid training. Certainly discipleship is about supervision. Perhaps our biggest disconnect is that we define discipleship differently. I would define discipleship as the guiding and training of the less experienced & knowledgeably by the more experienced & knowledgeable. I think of mentorship as a subcategory of discipleship.
By that definition, discipleship needs application to balance proper and solid biblical teaching to be properly formed. Evangelism is one of those applications of training that are a critical part of discipleship.
Would you say that the proper application of training is to ask direct them away from facebook until such a time as they can see it as an avenue of evangelism? I'm trying to see it from your side. :-)
> Would you say that the
Precisely stated. To do otherwise is to ask a recovering alcoholic to walk through a barroom to get to the AA meeting in the back room!
In Proverbs the father brought his son to the ancient version of what in Boston used to be called "the combat zone" where the girlie clubs and prostitutes and drunks hung out and said "Look and see the visible face of sin."
The clear context is that he had first taught his son, then waited until he was reasonably mature, and even then went with him rather than merely sending him out on his own hoping that he would understand and make wise choices.
There's an old country-western song with the line "There's a fool on every corner when you're trying to get home." Essentially the key point of Pilgrim's Progress.
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Hm, I see facebook like
Hm, I see facebook like driving down the highway on the way to church; the road signs are going to be there. There is as suggestive one on my route for condoms, and I can't drive with my eyes closed. (At least, my wife prefers that I don't.) I'm certainly not asking them to come to a porn site in order to find a link to the church website. What are the guidelines you use to draw that line?
Can't help you with the
Can't help you with the billboard other than to say that while some things are avoidable others are not - but why place yourself in spiritual harms-way when such is unnecessary? King David should have been with his soldiers but was slacking at home. He went to the roof and innocently saw Bathsheba - that was a moment of Testing. David chose to fail the Test and to convert it into a Temptation because he chose to keep looking. Then he went the next step and converted it to overt sin.
When we go places where we know temptation is more profound than another, or even worse by our choices as leaders lead others to those places, we own responsibility for the consequences. We, like David, can find other places to be and other things to look at (and be a party to encouraging others to do the same).
I think that my prior example was to choose to use GodTube for anything linked from the Church site and to post only materials specifically intended for seekers/non-believers on MySpace, YouTube, etc.
The suggestion is the same insofar as similar alternatives are available for other desired features.
Again, the critical difference is between evangelism/outreach and discipleship/inreach and the avoidance of in any way appearing to be endorsing or referring those coming out of the world back into it.
Being "in the world but not of it" means that we must be very intentional about everything that we do and to discern "unintended consequences".
The children have a good little song for this "Be careful little eyes what you see ..." :-)
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Should not an individuals
Should not an individuals life be built to take advantage of what opportunities exist for outreach or are you saying that outreach should only be done in the context of a church sanctioned event? That's the only way I can see it being so clearly separated as I understand you to be endorsing.
I'm not sure I buy the critical aspect of the difference between discipleship and evangelism. You've noted that Paul makes this clear. I'm curious what passages you refer to. Some aspects of both are clearly separate, but they do overlap.
I also don't buy the dangers of the appearance of endorsement. While we are to flee the appearance of evil, I don't think an Internet culture is going to say that a reference to a video hosted on YouTube is an endorsement of all its content. To some degree that may be a question of site audience, but I don't think a hard and fast rule. In other words, a question of culture.
Not Theology, Philosophy
I'm going to disagree. Apparently, that's what I do in this particular discussion. :-) Don't mind me. Internet ministry is something I have strong opinions about. I still like you if I disagree with you though.
First, I don't think it is theological, but rather philosophical. We aren't talking about the who God is or doctrine. We're talking about the way we apply it in ministry.
My implementation of technology is rooted in my theory of effective ministry. How to effectively use facebook in a church context, the original question, needs to be rooted in a philosophy of ministry. As is being demonstrated, the actual implementation of a facebook strategy could be drastically different between the two general strategies being proposed.
In other words, the original question can't be answered without the philosophy underneath.
Interesting thread...
This is an interesting thread, and as usual, what started as a quick and simple reply has sucked up a nice chunk of my day, leaving most of what I originally typed deleted.
I was going to comment that this discussion is not happening on G&G or some other "religiously oriented" website. It's happening right here "in the world" on g.d.o. I found it to be a little ironic, considering the nature of the debate. I decided to go back and look at the start of the thread again, and realized I'd allowed myself to get so wrapped up in the details that I'd forgotten what we were talking about.
In general, I'd agree that we need to meet the people where they are. That means using services like Facebook to connect with people who are both in and out of the church. I realized that the original question was about directly integrating our church Drupal sites with these outside services. Should we embrace external social networks to the point of direct integration with a church's own Drupal site? I think Pastor David's points on the distinction between discipleship and evangelism are a big part of that decision.
I'm not sure this is even about leveraging external services to save bandwidth or things like that. And it's not necessarily a question of whether or not we should be present on social networking sites. I think it's a question of when and where we as churches can and should let the different aspects of our Internet presence directly intersect and overlap.
After what I've read here, I think I'd lean more towards having external presence drive traffic towards our own Drupal sites, and not try to bolt all of that external stuff onto Drupal. OTOH, I think there may be some good integration points to help tie things together in a way that makes sense.
Micah
Another purpose besides outreach
Wow! I get busy for a few days and come back and find I missed a bunch of great discussion!! Thanks for digging in and giving us all some great stuff to think about.
Something one of our pastors said got me thinking about another purpose for facebook - besides the obvious one of outreach.
He said that following some people's comments on facebook allowed him or other pastors and care group leaders to use that as an opportunity to ask some people about some topics that would otherwise never have come up in the brief times of meeting at church activities. It has been a tool for biblical fellowship.
The biblical model and instruction for avoiding the "deceitfullness of sin" in Hebrews 3 and Ephesians 5 is to "exhort one another daily" and to "address one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs". Facebook can be (and has been) a place where this daily biblical fellowship has taken place. Clearly, in-person is the most effective context for this to take place, but if you have a good community on facebook that intentionally focuses their daily posts on biblical fellowship, it can glorify God there as well.
As to my original question of how a church website and facebook can/should work together - I am still stewing on that - part of the difficulty comes from the content of the church website carrying the endorsement/encouragement of the church - and that endorsement being implicitly conveyed to anything the church site links to.
From the other direction, if the content from the church website can be injected into other communities (ie outreach - sermons, recommended resources, events, etc) I think that would be more of a help.
But what about helping to drive biblical fellowship? Facebook seems to be a possible platform for that. How to take it from there to encouraging in-person fellowship? Promoting meetups? Promoting small group meetings, bible studies - or continuing discussions from them into the rest of the week - and involving others? Starting discussions about how doctrine applies to facebook comments? (or to drupal comments :) ?
More food for thought.
Steve T.
Facebook Resources
Here are some resources I've run across.
Facebook for Pastors (Free Ebook)
http://ministrymarketingcoach.com/free-e-books/
Drupal offers a Drupal for Facebook module
http://drupal.org/project/fb
Has anyone used this module? I haven't yet had the opportunity.
In Facebook users may choose
In Facebook users may choose to join one or more networks, organized by city, workplace, school, and region. Facebook has been the talk of the town a lot of people got fascinated to its application such as meeting with new friends. Even business entrepreneurs use this as a mode of advertising their products. More online groups start up every day. It also creates business opportunities, as companies have a whole other medium and platform in which to advertise their products. They no longer have to rely on email campaigns. (Most e-mail advertising gets deleted.) You can stay connected with customers and update them on specials and new products. Facebook can be quite the tool, and you don't need to get out the credit cards to join, since it's all-free.
http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/05/09/excitement-facebook-o...