Today's Tech Tuesday feature question is about social networking and what kind of role it could play in house churches:
I love all the work you have done in tracking Social networks (SN). Thanks a million!
What role do you see SN play in home house church movements?
Add a comment below to share your thoughts! If you are part of a house church, even better; share with us how you're using social networking. We've had some previous posts about how Mars Hill Church in Seattle uses SN as a large church, and a missional community church in Austin uses Facebook as their communications hub, but those aren't house churches.
To have your tech question featured in a future Tech Tuesday, email them anytime to me, DJ Chuang. Tech Tuesday is a friendly place where non-techies can ask any question.
-- DJ Chuang, Director of Digital Initiatives & more, Leadership Network
DJ,
This is a very interesting, pertinent question. I've hinted at my own musings on this questions on my personal blog here:
http://www.knightopia.com/journal/?p=867
Without getting into any level of detail (because I don't have time right now, unfortunately), I'll throw this out there: New faith communities that form in the future (in North America, especially) could/should have some social networking aspect to them.
What I mean by this is that for churches up until now, a website has been an "add-on," a marketing/communication tool, and possibly a community space. In the future, churches will be much more relationally-centered and will flow naturally out of a socially networking model/framework. So instead of setting up a website for your church, perhaps you should launch a niche social network for your neighborhood/town/city, and that social network would serve as your "church website."
To put it another way, church websites should start to look more like social networking sites and less like webzines, blogs, or (God forbid) "brochures on glass" ;-)
Is anybody already doing this? Probably. If so, I'd love to hear about it! Post a comment, ya'll. Give me some feedback here. I'd love to hear what others think about this proposition.
Posted by: Steve K. | March 12, 2008 at 10:35 PM
DJ
Specifically focussing on home churches for a moment. Facebook and similar SN sites provide a really simple means of connecting people during the week. While it may never (or should never) replace the face-to-face communication that meeting together provides, it does make an easy way to fire out prayer requests, reminders, social invitations, or even distribute useful information to people who are part of your church.
I’m a member of a regular and quite large church, but still Facebook is proving useful for networking with home group members during the week.
For use with the main body of the church it’s much less effective. We have about 170+ members of the church Facebook group, but many of them are inactive on the site and the majority have just joined the group to show some kind of allegiance. I did some research into this, and if you can bear trawling through the results you’ll find them here - http://journeyman-justpassingthrough.blogspot.com/2007/12/facebook-survey-results.html.
In the UK it has been noted that in the early part of 2008 there was about a 5% drop of in Facebook visits. Maybe the bubble has burst. There are a number of suggested reasons for the drop off in activity. The site becoming too commercialised is one key issue. But, this doesn’t prevent it from being a useful tool for secure conversation.
I’m inclined to agree with Steve that the future of church communications looks much more like SN. I think video is going to play a much bigger part in what we do. The real challenge is going to be changing preconceived ideas about what the internet is all about.
Posted by: Phil | March 19, 2008 at 04:50 PM