The Internet, Facebook And The Church

Via Internet Evangelism Day’s Facebook page: Internet World Stats have published details of Facebook usage statistics around the world. Not only that, these same statistics also mention general Internet usage in the nations of the world.

Of particular interest to me are the United Kingdom stats, which can be found on the European Union page. As of June last year, 82.5% of the population had Internet access. As of August last year, 44.6% were Facebook users.

OK, so some will have opened accounts and either not used them or only used them sporadically, but how much more convincing do churches need that an Internet and social media presence and strategy is no longer optional, it is central? It isn’t enough to say that these statistics don’t reflect the much lower usage among members of an elderly congregation, even when that is true, because such thinking openly betrays the lack of missionary thinking. Is the Internet just a glorified internal communication tool for the church, or is it somewhere to interact with the world in the name of Christ and with the love of God?

Both my churches here have Facebook pages that I set up. At present we don’t use them a lot, and I have to remember to put updates on them. Mostly there is the automated feed of my blog posts through them, but we could think of more, I’m sure. Similarly, Knaphill has a website. Addlestone used to, and is in the process of designing a new one.

The church needs to recognise that people are living a large amount of their lives online today. I don’t simply mean the minority who live almost exclusively online to the detriment of face-to-face relationships: I mean that millions live online in extension to the rest of their lives.

So thank God for initiatives like CODEC and others, such as the forthcoming Open Source evening at the Pentecost Festival (which, sadly, I can’t attend). We need to take what comes out of these ventures and translate them into mission in the local church.

All of this may be obvious to readers of this blog. You come here, either because you visit the site, you get the email updates, you follow it in a feed reader or via my Twitter stream or on Facebook through my account, the blog page, or one of the two churches above. But others need convincing, and this is something we need to communicate passionately and eloquently in our churches – not so that our online usage is a mere digital church notice sheet, but so that we genuinely and conversationally interact with a massive section of the population that we say we want to reach.

One or two of my church leaders recently wanted to think about streaming a video feed of church services online. It isn’t going to prove practical since there are too many hurdles, such as child protection, data protection, the number of personnel to do it effectively and possibly the cost, too. However, nothing could delight me more than that they are thinking imaginatively and not letting the old “We haven’t done it before” slogan prevent them coming up with ideas. What a great bunch of people they are to work with, especially in this culture.

May 30, 2011 0

Biblefresh, The Church And Outreach

Next year marks four hundred years since the Authorised Version (King James Version for my North American friends) was published. In the UK, churches are planning to celebrate 2011 as The Year Of The Bible. A major project to support this is called Biblefresh, which seeks to help the church regain confidence in reading the Bible.

That’s a great idea. However, I’ve run into a problem. Last Monday evening, I was at a meeting of representatives from the four churches in this village (not counting the fifth church that thinks it contains the only true Christians), where we discussed how we were going to mark next year’s big anniversary. Some of them had met a few months ago to start thinking and planning. And our difficulty is this: it seems only natural to us to take our celebrations public. However, the Biblefresh focus on renewing the church’s confidence in Bible reading, important as it is, means that an outreach focus isn’t within its purview. You won’t really find much mention of anything like that on their website, except for the odd comment from Elaine Lindridge, a Methodist Evangelism Enabler in the Newcastle District.

So … I’m posting here, there and everywhere in the social media parts of the Internet to see whether other people have ideas. (These include the Facebook pages for BigBible and Biblefresh.) We’d love to be stimulated by creative sparks elsewhere that might inspire our thinking and praying. If you have any ideas, I’d love you to shre them here.

October 3, 2010 3

How To Celebrate Your Birthday

Tomorrow, I shall do something I never achieved when batting at cricket. I shall reach a half century. After receiving an email from the Causes application on Facebook, I wondered about asking my friends to donate to a good cause. To cut a long story short, I couldn’t find any of the officially supported causes that would be just right.

However, here is a fantastic story of a man (admittedly with more abilities and connections than me) who was inspired to do something amazing for others through social media when he reached forty. Read the story of Danny Brown and be inspired. There is no hint this guy is a Christian, but there is so much we could learn from him.

March 3, 2010 6

World Wide Open: A Social Network For Christian Mission?

Through reading an article on social media and the Gospel in the latest edition of the Evangelical Alliance‘s magazine ‘IDEA’, I came across World Wide Open. It’s a social network that aims to connect and empower Christians across the world in order to share expertise and thus further mission. I wondered whether anyone who reads this blog has come across it. What are your experiences?

I thought I would at least register, because some things can only be experienced from inside. The introductory videos are impressive in laying out the vision. However, beyond that, my first impression is that registration and getting going are hard work. You need to supply a lot of information, type in lots of text and click several text boxes to create the kind of profile that might lead to fruitful contact with others in the future. I’m not sure how it could be simplified, but if it could, I think that would be helpful.

Other tools could do with a different approach. There is an opportunity to blog at the site, but only by creating blog posts there. I noticed no facility to import posts from an existing blog. I would think many likely contributors already have their own blogs, and would not want to create another one. Another worthy Christian social network, Missional Tribe, and my reaction was, I don’t want to go to the effort of duplicating my posts.

The IDEA magazine article tells one or two wonderful stories of worthwhile links being created between different agencies. I hope that will come to fruition at WWO. It says (as seems to be the fashion for a ‘Web 2.0‘ site) that it is in ‘beta‘, and that seems to be accurate to me. It isn’t quite the finished article yet, but I hope it soon will be, and become a helpful tool for the mission of God.

UPDATE, Tuesday 2nd March, 11:15 am: World Wide Open is beginning to kick into action. This morning I received an email from them with my ‘customised updates’. Based on the interests I selected when I signed up, it offers to put me in touch with other registered users. This can be on the basis of leveraging their experience, resources they have uploaded, opportunities to put faith into action, groups I might like to join and people with whom I might like to connect. Naturally, only a minority of them will prove directly relevant, but it is a start and a sign of how the site works.

February 28, 2010 3

Official British Methodist Blogging Feed

Here’s another excellent new resource from the Methodist Church’s Connexional Team. Put together by Dave Webster, our Internet officer, you can now find a fed with all the latest from British Methodist bloggers. It’s available here on the official site, powered by Yahoo! Pipes. Dave told me (and doubtless other bloggers) about it in an email yesterday, just before it went live, when he asked permission to include my blog. It is officially now public, although this morning it doesn’t seem to be pulling in any feeds (whereas yesterday it was working well). I imagine normal service will soon be resumed. You may find it an easy way to check out official and unofficial Methodist thinking all in one place.

February 23, 2010 0

Big Circumstance On Facebook

Just to say I’ve now created a separate page for this blog on Facebook. Go here and you can sign up to be a ‘fan’ (horrible word I know, but it’s Facebook lingo) to see my posts there. Some while ago I took the feed from the blog out of Facebook due to problems with the way FB generated ‘notes’. I hope this is a better way. Please give me some helpful feedback when it’s been up and running a while.

February 21, 2010 6

PrayNow

Right, I’m back to topical blogging. If you’ve followed my Twitter feed, you’ll know where I’ve been – Disneyland Paris. With Debbie and the children, of course. It was an advance present for a rather big birthday I have looming in the next fortnight. Too big, in fact, for my liking.

I’ll blog a bit about the experience soon, but in the meantime let me just put a marker down for something I came back to discover when I was wading through my Facebook feed. The remarkable Sir Peter of Phillips has blogged today about an excellent new initiative set up by the Methodist Church, called PrayNow. Send a text saying PRAYNOW to 82088 (at your network’s standard message rate) and you will receive free weekly texts with personal and topical prayer requests. (To stop, send STOP PRAYNOW to 82088.) Small church groups have been doing things like this for ages, and it’s good to see it taken up on a national scale. And having been somewhat wary in recent weeks about some official Methodist attitudes to social tools, it’s only right I praise what looks like a positive initiative.

Do read Pete’s article for links to other Christian-flavoured social tools, especially ones that help people interact with the Bible.

February 21, 2010 0

I’m Old, Therefore I Blog

The BBC reports that blogging is losing popularity among American teenagers, while rising slightly among the over-30s. Why?

One student said teenagers had lost interest in blogging because they needed to type quickly and “people don’t find reading that fun”.

Shorter updates are in vogue, but Facebook status updates rather than Twitter tweets. The increased use of mobile technology to access the Internet has exacerbated the need for brevity.

Meanwhile, those who continue ‘long form blogging’ may find some of their activities restricted during the forthcoming UK General Election. The Register reports that in the period between the election writ being moved and the election taking place, it may prove to be illegal to use one’s blog to campaign for a particular candidate. Facebook groups supporting a candidate for a specific constituency may also be illegal. It’s all about ensuring candidates don’t find ways around the limits on election expenses. The law hasn’t been tested, and returning officers are looking into it.

February 4, 2010 2

Methodists And Social Media: Constructive Ways Forward

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I’m just using this post to draw together different initiatives in the wake of Monday’s Methodist Council decision. There is a discussion happening on my post yesterday about areas where we might draw discussions together. Matt Wardman has suggested the Methodist Recorder’s website, I have suggested using one of the existing Facebook groups for Methodists.

But meanwhile, Dave Warnock has set something up. Hats off and show your receding hairline (if you’re a man) to him! In Opening Consultation: Social Media Guidelines he tells us he has set up a Google document. If you give Dave your email address he will authorise you to edit it. Between us he hopes we can come up with a set of values for social media that authentically reflects Methodist spirituality.

And I also wanted to draw attention to something on David Hallam’s blog. In his brief post yesterday he helpfully draws our attention to an article on the Social Media Examiner about IBM’s attitude to employees’ use of social media. Essentially, it’s one full of permission and blessing, albeit backed up by guidelines. I’ve only had time for a quick skim, but at first glance it looks like a creative approach from an industry that has to understand social media. As indeed must we.

How thankful I am that people are thinking of these initiatives in order to take us beyond debate to action.

February 3, 2010 4

Category: Weblogs