Look Ma, No Boundaries: Pastoral Implications for Social Media

On Friday I attended a Social Media Seminar at school.  In a three hour event, this neo-luddite learned more than I ever thought I would want to know about Twitter and Facebook; strangely I found myself curious to know more!  According to our speakers, social media is becoming integral to their pastoral care and identities: they use the internet to connect and keep up with both their own personal support networks and their congregants - and they find that they know more and are more strongly connected because of it.  I learned a bit about the statistics and realities of using this ubiquitous communication, and I came away with a vastly changed (or at least vastly nuanced) opinion about the relevance of this stuff for the church.

Our two guest speakers – Jim Liberatore (@gamma909) and Torey Lightcap (@fathertorey) – feel that because of their connections on Facebook and Twitter they have greater access to and involvement in the lives of their parishioners.  They claimed that most pastors are completely unaware of 90% of the lives of their congregants, and that they only have access to the 10% or so of crisis times in peoples’ lives.  With social media, though, the picture is different: they see so much more of what is going on and are able to respond and interact – to build relationship – well before those 10% moments come about.  Jim said that most of his younger parishioners (especially those with young children) only show up to church about twice a month; but because of their online connections he feels involved and aware of their needs.  He says that the majority of Christian education in his parish is accomplished via thought pieces on Facebook.  This is a sea change from the church I grew up in – I’ll be thinking about this for a while.

We talked for a time about whether social media accounts should be split up for personal / professional use: while the conventional wisdom is yes, the practicality is that professional Facebook and Twitter accounts appear so sanitized as to be meaningless.  Both our speakers say that for them, social media is always “me being me,” but that it is also “always professional.”  That is to say: “if you wouldn’t say it at coffee hour or in a class – don’t say it online.”  I have to imagine that this kind of blurring of the lines requires much trial and error – and all of our speakers were able to contribute much to my understanding of what might and might not work.

Because of this seminar, I am now a Twitter(er?) user (@mcarroccino), and I am interested in cultivating a (very slightly) larger on-line presence.  This is an intimidating thought for me: as an introvert, nearly every time I click a button that says “post”, my blood pressure goes up a few points.  It’s hard to be warts-and-all human in a medium that cannot convey the richness of physical expression, but I’m willing to give it a try!

You can find the live-blog version of our conversation at #mysswsms - and here's the bibliography of what we covered.