“What’s important here,” says Rollins, “is that all of this media belongs to everyone. We’re all creating it and sharing it together.”
In a sense, as James Rollins describes the social media ministry of the United Methodist Church, this makes every church a global relief agency, every congregant an active agent of God’s love and compassion in the wider world. This work is no longer the narrow purview of church-sponsored NGOs, who collect money from churches to distribute around the globe on behalf of believers.
In the digital world, this gathering of globally distributed participants in loosely organized communities is called “crowdsourcing,” a practice that ignores the traditional boundaries of geography, status, gender, race, class, and so on to draw on the practical wisdom of everyone with an interest in helping to solve a problem, disseminate ideas, or collaborate on projects related to shared interests. Crowdsourcing is now used to support the microfinancing of small businesses around the globe whose owners would never qualify for traditional financing (as through the microlending sites Kiva and MicroPlace). But it’s more often not so focused and goal-directed. When you participate in social media networks like Face- book, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the like as someone who is open and articulate about her or his faith, you are, in effect, crowdsourcing Christianity, crowd-sourcing the church. You are extending the love of Christ both within and beyond the boundaries of your local community and, more than that, inviting others to share their faith and their lives with you and your community. Whether or not this translates into more “pledging units,” you are vastly expanding the reach of the faith in the world.
RELIGION RULES FACEBOOK
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The average American Facebook user spends about twelve minutes a day checking in on her Facebook news feed, updating her status, and “liking” or commenting on friends’ statuses. Slight though this may seem, it adds up to more than five hours a month on Facebook alone.3 Users in Israel and Russia spend twice that amount of time, clocking more than ten hours a month on Facebook.4
There’s more! By summer’s end, while you were relaxing in your hammock, the Jesus Daily Facebook page was ranked the number one “most engaging” page, trouncing teen heartthrob Justin Bieber and soccer powerhouse Manchester United.5 The Jesus Daily page was hardly alone at the top as a marker of the religious interests of Facebook Nation. Also in the top twenty were pages for the Bible, Jesus Christ (one of many), “Dios Es Bueno!,” “I’m a Muslim & Proud!,” and Joyce Meyer Ministries. Eleven of these came in ahead of Barack Obama and glam-pop megastar Lady Gaga.
Importantly, the “most engaging” ratings are not based just on the number of members a Facebook page has—Bieber and Gaga are well ahead in terms of raw numbers. Rather, the ranking takes into account the number of interactions on the page, including posts, comments on posts, and likes. What has pulled religion-oriented pages to the top is not, then, that people of faith are interested only in displaying their faith, but that they also want to talk about it with others.
This engagement factor highlights a key aspect of digital ministry that we noted in the introduction and that bears repeating here: ministry in the Digital Reformation—not only in digital locales but also in local spaces in which interaction is increasingly shaped by digital practice—is networked and relational rather than broadcast and numerical. It’s about how you connect in meaningful, personal ways with people across diverse networks, not about how many people hear your message. It is here that, we feel strongly, approaches to ministry online based on commercial marketing strategies are bound to fail miserably in the long run. People don’t want to buy what you’re selling. They want to know who you are.
Before we move on to learn more about who all these religiously engaged social media participants are, take a moment to consider this: What would it mean to your church or other faith organization to have an active cohort of people who, even for five minutes a day, were interested in gathering to pray, comment on scripture, discuss the needs of the world in light of their faith? If those folks were willing to gather outside your doors, would you be willing, as a ministry leader, to take time to encourage them and help to enrich their time together?
Well, these folks might not be outside your office door, but they are certainly right outside your digital door, on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Indeed, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that a full 65 percent of American adults who use the Internet are members of Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn— participation that has doubled since 2008 and is increasing at a rate of about 10 percent per year.
LIKING
“Liking” on Facebook is when you click the word “like” under a post, photo, or video. This causes a teeny thumbs up icon to appear below the post:
“Liking” is a quick way to show you’re paying attention, give a nod of approval, or just say “hello” on someone else’s Facebook wall. It makes minimal, but often meaningful, engagement possible within your Facebook community.
See Chapter 3 for more on using Facebook in digital ministry.
WHO INHABITS THE DIGITAL WORLD?
Generically speaking, the typical social media user looks something like this:
Typical U.S. Social Networking Participant6
Globally, social networking participation skews more toward men, a trend which is echoed among participants in the largest social network, Facebook:
Typical Facebook Participant7
Twitter is used far less than Facebook. Twitter itself reported some 100 million active users in the second half of 2011, but there have been significant questions about how active most of those users really are.8 Still, Twitter’s growth has been strong, with more than three hundred thousand people joining each day. Its growth has been amped up by its role as a conduit for on-the-scene reporting after natural disasters in Haiti and Japan and political uprisings in the Middle East. Beyond the urgent or otherwise newsworthy, the site has proved to be a valuable resource for researchers tracking the more general public mood,9 which makes aggregated Twitter feeds a gold mine for understanding how people feel about politics, economics, and other important issues—like, oh, faith, spirituality, religion—on a daily basis.
Its 140-character format is particularly attractive to mobile phone users, making it a more accessible platform for social networking in regions where more expensive desktop, laptop, and tablet computers are thin on the ground. Outside of the U.S., Twitter is most popular in the Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, and Venezuela.10 Based on data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a typical American Twitter participant looks something like this:
Typical U.S. Twitter Participant11
In Chapter 3, we will provide some further notes on the characteristics of the users of other social media platforms, but this overview of users
