Leadership Journal

It's 2 p.m. on a Thursday, and several people are sharing words of encouragement during our church's five-day challenge to raise funds for hunger relief.

A young professional asks, "Anyone feeling more satisfied and optimistic today?" A stay-at-home mom talks about her children's "beans and rice" song. A high school student confesses he is "humbled," and has a new perspective on materialism. It's the kind of interaction that every pastor hopes for—a community that transcends age and stage, with the work of the gospel at the center.

And it's all happening on Twitter.

The five-day challenge was Hope Church's first "full-court press" experience using Facebook, Twitter and blogging to unite a diverse community throughout the week. And the impact on the congregation convinced senior leadership that the church's relationship with social media must be taken seriously.

Many church leaders are waking up to the fact that social media is a force to be reckoned with. The numbers don't lie: there are 500 million Facebook users—and 50 percent use it every day. Twitter, a micro blogging tool that allows users to post 140 character messages, also boasts millions of active users with thousands joining daily. With numbers like these, it's only natural to wonder how you might use social media to help your ministry.

Let's explore three significant ways to leverage social media to multiply a ministry's effectiveness. We'll weave in lessons we've learned experimenting with blogging, texting, Facebook, and Twitter in our own churches. We'll also glean insights from the examples of other pastors and ministry leaders navigating these new media. We've chosen three specific ways social media multiplies the effectiveness of ministry: for information, innovation, and mobilization.

Nothing is more frustrating than devoting weeks or even months of planning to a church event only to have it fail because you didn't get the word out. We can't force people come to our events, but we can make sure they know about them. Using Facebook and Twitter is a quick way to reach people, with the added bonus of enabling people to easily pass along invites and information to family and friends.

Mark Montgomery, pastor of a small congregation in Texas, has seen the benefit of moving the church newsletter to an electronic format and posting it on the church's Facebook page. On an average month, there are as many people accessing the church's Facebook page as there are attending church. Although it took two years to make the change, Montgomery sees the addition of social media as "all positive."

When transitioning to electronic communication, more work up front pays off in the end. For instance, when we started a blog to post announcements for our women's ministry at Hope, we let women consent to receiving blog updates via e-mail on a pen-and-paper signup sheet. A volunteer then entered all the e-mails into the blog so that the women in the group could receive announcements quickly and easily.

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