Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I have been booked several times now to speak about social media in the Church. Friends and family who know me well find great humor in this, as do I. Asking me to speak at a conference on social media is a bit like asking a videotape to parse Latin sentences in the presence of ocelots.

When I am booked for such work, I try to talk the person booking me out of it. The truth is: I am not a big social media person. This is when the person booking me tells me that she or he is up against a deadline or that really they just wanted to hear Southside Abbey stories and their only free slot was in social media. This is not to say that I do not think social media is important, because I do. I really, really do! The Apostle Paul used all the media at his disposal: he talked to people, he spoke in public (sometimes in chains), and he wrote letters. We have to be using every type of media at our disposal too.

Let me explain. Southside Abbey has a fair number of people who do not have cell phones or computers or anything like that as an ever-present part of their lives. This may be due to social location, geographic location, educational location, or temporal location, but it is there as a reality. We also have a fair number of people who are active in social media; they post a lot of pictures, quotes, videos, articles, and the like. These two groups have kept me from 1) relying on social media for communication with our entire body and 2) kept me from learning a lot about social media because I am surrounded by people who like to and do engage that way and who do it a lot better than I would.

This may sound like a digression, but one of the things that I have been asked for more than once is a set of social media guidelines. When I have asked why, I’m told it is because Southside Abbey's Facebook presence (a group for locals and a page for the diaspora) has so far been free from back-and-forth arguments that plague some churchy digital domains.

I can't give what I don't have, but I have noticed some trends that work for us, which may be especially helpful in light of recent social-media-post-worthy-events. My first and foremost rule is that email is for factual transmission only. If an email is as long as this blog post, the information contained therein is probably better shared over a cup of ice cream or the telephone.

The second trend ties deeply to what we are about at Southside Abbey in terms of formation. We do a lot of leadership development, in tandem with working toward spiritual maturity. Social maturity is a prerequisite to both of these, so we work on social maturity too. This work is paying off in our digital space, but may have as much to do with WHO we are promoting: not ourselves or our way of doing things, but Jesus. 

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