In light of much, much discussion about social media and ministry, and in light of many writing on online church community, I was wondering what you think of the post below, taken from Collide Magazine’s blog.

I Wouldn’t Hire You

If in some bizarro parallel universe I was an executive pastor (or whoever does the hiring at churches these days) and I was interviewing candidates for a ministry position that involved working with people between the ages of 12 and 30, I’d ask you about your vision and strategy for the ministry (youth ministry, college ministry, young adults ministry, whatever). I’d listen with great interest as you talked about discipleship, community, service, outreach, etc. I’d even ask you good questions about how you see those things fitting together and how you’d develop each of those initiatives. Then, when it was all said and done, and I’d heard your vision and strategy, I don’t think I’d hire you if you failed to mention your plan for leveraging social media. At the very least, I’d keep interviewing candidates in hopes of finding someone with similar passion and qualifications who was also social media-literate.

The ways in which 12-30 year-olds communicate and connect has radically changed in the last few years, and frankly, as someone who wants to minister vocationally to that demographic, I’d expect you to understand that. On top of that, there are too many free or inexpensive tools out there—ROOV, Twitter, Facebook Groups & Pages, MyChurch, Flickr, Vimeo, Ning, and on and on—for me to be enthusiastic about a job applicant who is unaware of them and their potential for ministry application.

If I’m choosing between several equally-qualified candidates, I wouldn’t hire you unless without a competent plan for leveraging social media in ministry to emerging generations.

What do you think? Am I overrating the importance of social media-literacy among would-be church staffers? If you are a would-be church staffer, have you thought through your social media strategy?

I was thinking about this issue and realized that there has always been criteria for employment in ministry. Those requirements vary depending upon church, denomination, ministry, etc., etc.

For example, when I was hired as a college pastor they were looking for someone with a Master of Divinity which I was just about to complete. Having that degree told the church hiring me that I was sufficient in areas such as Greek, Hebrew, Church History, Systematic Theology, etc.

But over the years I realized that things that weren’t required of me, nor my degree were necessary. Money management. Administrative skills. Counseling skills. Web 2.0 skills.

The questions for us are, “What is required for us to do ministry in certain contexts?” “What is required in the context of today’s ministry climate?”

Today, I think a certain proficiency in social media/web 2.0 tools is required for ministry, especially as we head into this new century. Now we can debate which skills are required for which ministries, and do all ministries require a certain minimal skill set.

But all things being equal (as Scott noted in his post), I would hire the person who had more social media/web 2.0 skill set, or who at least was willing to experiment and learn in that area. That may seem like a no brainer with all things being equal, but maybe it isn’t.

There are certain intangibles in ministry, and certain gifts that we all have that can’t easily be taught. Preaching, teaching, writing, management, conflict skills, etc. But,

Can social media/web 2.0 skills be taught?

And do you hire based on the possession of those skills or not?

As we become a people that live more of our lives online, I think the expectation will be there in ministry for pastors and leaders to be able to navigate themselves in that world. Just as pastors are to understand the context of the text and the culture of those sitting in the pew, they will be required to have as a language skill set that of social media/web 2.0. It will be like taking Greek and Hebrew, though I have a feeling Greek and Hebrew will be less and less taught due to the availability of online tools.


What skills set are looking for today if you were to hire for your ministry? And is social media/web 2.0 skills one of them?

If you are thinking about having more of an online web presence for you church, but aren’t sure how to dive in…or even if you have a great web presence and are in need of some ideas, check out below.

First, Tony Steward has a great post How to Launch an Online Community. Here is the link to much of what Tony talks about in regards to the work of Jeremiah Owyang, Online Community Best Practices Final.

Second, Cynthia Ware has a post 10 Challenges Facing the Church in Cyberspace.

Third, here are My 9 Posts for Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry (and ministry in general).

Fourth, Chris Brogan has a fascinating post, Workflow–Social Media Pastor.

Hope you can glean something from these posts, and if you have any ideas, or other links to blogs, or your blog, please leave them in the comment section.

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry

• Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed.
• Part 2–The Purpose of Your Website
• Part 3–Why You Should Be Blogging
• Part 4–Using Facebook Effectively
• Part 5–How Twitter Can Catalyze Your Ministry
• Part 6–Using Social Network Platforms as Your Central Hub
• Part 7–Flickr, YouTube and Other Forms of Sharing and Streaming
• Part 8–Ministry Collaboration Using Wikis
• Part 9–Opening Up Your Ministry’s API



Thoughts?

Suggestions?

Corrections?

Affirmations?

Resources?

I’m listening….

Opening Up Your API

An application programming interface (API) is a set of functions, procedures or classes that an operating system, library or service provides to support requests made by computer programs.[1]

* Language-dependent APIs are available only in a particular programming language. They utilize the syntax and elements of the programming language to make the API convenient to use in this particular context.

* Language-independent APIs are written in a way that means they can be called from several programming languages. This is a desired feature for a service-style API which is not bound to a particular process or system and is available as a remote procedure call. Source: API on Wikipedia

Yeah I know….probably too techy for most of us. I barely understand it. And if I don’t know what I’m talking about, please correct me. This is a learning process for me as well as I’m trying to stretch my mind on this topic.

But what I do understand is that many successful online applications open up their API’s for outside development. You Tube and Twitter are just two examples. If you are wondering on whether or not a company does this, you can usually find it at the bottom of the page. Another company such as Facebook has a place for developers who want to build an app on the Facebook platform.

Successful companies allow and encourage outside collaboration on their product and platform?

Yes. Why?

Because collaboration and voices from within a company or organization, or those voices outside of a company or organization can bring much innovation and ideas that those at the top of the company or organization’s hierarchy are often blind to or don’t have the skill themselves to achieve.

Hence, the reason why you have tons of Twitter applications that many people are using, and that Twitter didn’t develop themselves but that are highly successful. Twitterfeed, Tweetdeck, and on and on it goes.

Great example of how one company harnesses the creativity, energy, passion and innovation of thousands of other people.

What If Our Churches Did More of This

The parallel that I draw from this example in technology is that churches need to not “run”, “create”, or “plan” everything from the central office, but rather, need to harness the innovation and creativity from the dozens, to hundreds, to thousands of people they have attending their church.

Most churches function via committee, and most of the power is centralized at the executive staff level that only a handful of people have the “privilege” of sitting on. And I use the word privilege here lightly, because you know what I mean if you ever attend these meetings…they are sometimes more life taking than giving and innovation is usually not created here. There are exceptions I know.

Rather, I believe innovation is created, harnessed at the lower levels of a hierarchy, or where power is decentralized. There are many good books on this topic, but a few of my favorite are:

1. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
2. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
3. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Fear of Losing Our Jobs

I think that there is a great fear in ministry to decentralize power and unleash the potential and creativity of the people we minister to and serve with. I get it. Because if we truly let go of power than maybe we soon realize that our job is no longer needed when tons of people are doing it for free…and possibly better. I was fearful of moving my former ministry The Quest (at Bel Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles) over to Facebook as the main way of communicating. Fear of losing control of content, of losing power and control of being the central hub of ideas along with our student leadership team.

But ultimately I think that the most Biblical thing we can do is give our power away in our church (Jesus obviously embodies this, the Sermon on the Mount), as I believe that’s what Paul was striving for in Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12 in his teaching on the body.

If there are many members and only one body, then why is power so centralized in the Church? And the power I’m talking about is not usually centralized where it’s supposed to be…in the person of Jesus Christ as its head. Rather, we have centralized power to only a handful of people…usually men, and usually ordained, and usually among people who have been in a church setting alone for too long that innovation doesn’t really happen where it is needed.

Steps to Open Up Your Ministry’s API

There are a lot of things that need to be done in this area, but let me just suggest 5 steps (but keep in mind that each one involves a lot of other things…but that’s for another post).

1. Decentralize Power: Haaa. If it were that easy. It’s not. But that would be nice. So let’s start with step 2.




2. Evaluate Your Organization: (interview staff, observe, talk to “outsider”, etc.) find out where the “bottleneck” is occurring and where communication is lacking.




3. Develop an Online Strategy: that utilizes tools for doing this effectively. It’s not good enough to use Facebook, Wiki’s, Twitter, etc., but there needs to be a strategy for using these tools and how these tools will help decentralize power and allow for more voices and innovation.




4. Allow for Other Voices: Ministries need to invite other people to the table. Just not the people at the top, or those with the money and power. Let a wide spectrum of people within the church give voice, suggest and create.




5. Collaborate: When you have set up the tools, developed a strategy, allowed for other voices, then we must begin to collaborate as a team. Only when we work together will we truly be in a place to move in a new direction, or try new things, or create “effective” ministries.

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry

• Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed.
• Part 2–The Purpose of Your Website
• Part 3–Why You Should Be Blogging
• Part 4–Using Facebook Effectively
• Part 5–How Twitter Can Catalyze Your Ministry
• Part 6–Using Social Network Platforms as Your Central Hub
• Part 7–Flickr, YouTube and Other Forms of Sharing and Streaming
• Part 8–Ministry Collaboration Using Wikis
• Part 9–Opening Up Your Ministry’s API

DISCLAIMERS: 1)There are better technical people out there concerning the web. 2) Do as I suggest, not as I do. I’m trying to keep up myself, and our college website reflects almost nothing of what I talk about. That’s how fast things change. 3) There are a lot of college ministries out there, and there are a lot of online tools to use, but it doesn’t seem like many are thinking through how to best utilize the new media and Web 2.0 (and yikes, Web 3.0) in their groups. 4) Knowing that things change overnight in technology, I hope to somehow impart to you some of the things I have been learning and wrestling with in these areas. You don’t need to be an expert in this area, just know enough to think critically about the issue. 5) If you have feedback, suggestions, criticisms, please comment. This is by no means all encompassing.

This is actually the form of social media and online sharing that I am the least familiar with. I have only had a Flickr account for about 6 months, and I just upgraded to Flickr Pro. How many videos have I uploaded to YouTube? Only a couple. So this is new territory, but a territory nonetheless that I think ministries need to explore more often.

Let me start with a couple of reasons for why you should use these tools:

1. People like watching videos and looking at photos. Period. In my opinion, they are often more likely to do this then read a post or follow a debate on a forum page.




2. I think ministries need to start creating more of their own content. Why? One, because how many churches use stock photos of people on their websites that don’t even attend church. I usually hear, “Hey, I’ve never seen them at our church.” Or my favorite, “Our church is not that ethnically diverse.” That’s usually the typical Bible study photo that has a representative of every tribe, tongue and nation represented, and is nowhere close to the actual makeup of the church. Two, video and photos give great insight into people’s lives.




3. Shooting, editing, creating and uploading video and photo content has never been easier.




4. These tools are so easy to use that anyone in the community can create content and participate. You don’t have to leave it in the hands of professionals or video/photo department people. This does two things. One, allows for community participation. Two, reflects more the reality of a community, than stuff being created by one department. And when communities participate, the content doesn’t have the constant professional look to it, but looks more reality which is nice. Not that professional is bad at all…but raw footage from the community is great also.

What Would This Look Like?

For example in the college ministry that I used to pastor, The Quest, here is what I think would have been helpful if I had done it. Obviously Facebook is one place where people share photo and video content with each other, but who is going to go look at each profile?

So I think what would be helpful is to have a “central hub” webpage, as I discussed in The Purpose of Your Website. And on this page you would embed the code from Flickr, YouTube, etc. that would automatically stream the content from your community to the page so that everyone could see it. You wouldn’t need to go look at multiple locations, but go to this one home page and share video and photos. This can be done by creating accounts that everyone can upload to.

Then you can develop some creative team to use those photos and videos that are uploaded to the site and post them at various sites in your community, like Facebook, a blog, etc. So you have one site where all the content is uploaded to, and a team that sifts through the material and places it in different ministry locations online.

Some Good Tools

Like I mentioned at the top. I’m a rookie to this, so please chime in with some suggestions. But here is some tools that I have found helpful and have used.

1. Flickr: Great photo management site. You can get quite a bit of space and ability with a free account. But a Pro account is fairly cheap and gives you lots to work with. I mainly migrated to Flickr based on what I have read in various books on this topic and by the many praises from other such as Wess Daniels and Terry Storch. Flickr is great for photo management, but also you can upload video as well. They have a 90 second limit for video which I think is great. It really helps when determining what you want to shoot and share. I use Flickr video for my blog intro., but I don’t use it for a longer retreat video, etc.




2. Vimeo: I love this video site. I have migrated from YouTube over to this site. I like the look of the site better. I like that my videos upload faster, etc. Check it out. You can create communities around your videos and create your own channels.




3. YouTube: This is obviously the standard. Some people love it and it’s fun to go to their YouTube channels to see what they have done.

These are the only three I’m sharing.

So what photo/video management/sharing sites do you use and like?

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry

• Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed.
• Part 2–The Purpose of Your Website
• Part 3–Why You Should Be Blogging
• Part 4–Using Facebook Effectively
• Part 5–How Twitter Can Catalyze Your Ministry
• Part 6–Using Social Network Platforms as Your Central Hub
• Part 7–Flickr, YouTube and Other Forms of Sharing and Streaming
• Part 8–Ministry Collaboration Using Wikis
• Part 9–Opening Up Your Ministry’s API

DISCLAIMERS: 1)There are better technical people out there concerning the web. 2) Do as I suggest, not as I do. I’m trying to keep up myself, and our college website reflects almost nothing of what I talk about. That’s how fast things change. 3) There are a lot of college ministries out there, and there are a lot of online tools to use, but it doesn’t seem like many are thinking through how to best utilize the new media and Web 2.0 (and yikes, Web 3.0) in their groups. 4) Knowing that things change overnight in technology, I hope to somehow impart to you some of the things I have been learning and wrestling with in these areas. You don’t need to be an expert in this area, just know enough to think critically about the issue. 5) If you have feedback, suggestions, criticisms, please comment. This is by no means all encompassing.

Social Networks have been one of the greatest things to happen to college ministry. There are many reasons why I have found them to be so helpful, but let’s begin with a video primer, because I know some of you, though familiar with social networks, may wonder their exact purpose or how they function. For that I turn to the awesome video series Social Networking in Plain English by Common Craft

I believe that it’s important to have your college ministry in a social network, and that that network should act as your central hub. There are several reasons for that as I want to discuss further with you.
Read the rest of this entry »

Despite some of the bad press recently regarding Twitter, I still must say that I absolutely love it. Sure there are days when things take way too long to load, or they don’t load at all. But despite all that, Twitter is still the first site that I log onto when I get on the internet in the morning. What other site is going to instantly bring me up to date with what everyone in my network (friends, family, co-workers, etc) is doing?

For a great step by step primer on Twitter, check out Matt Singley’s post.

Check out Twitter in Plain English series below:

Those are some great resources on Twitter. And in fact, lots of people are writing about Twitter so it’s not hard to find online some effective ways to use it. So what I want to focus on in this post is just a few ways how you can effectively use Twitter in your ministry…or as I say above, how it can catalyze your ministry.

Three Reasons to Use Twitter in Your Ministry Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to Facebook I’m definitely an evangelist, but it wasn’t always that way. I was one of those pastors who was somewhat fearful of online social technology. I was an early adopter in some ways, but when it came to working with college students I was definitely a late adopter to MySpace (my students had been on for more than a year), and I was also a late adopter to Facebook (my students had been on it for over a year as well).

By the time I got the nerve up to put us on MySpace, my students had already left it and were living online on Facebook. I still remember the Wednesday night in the Spring of 2006 when one of my student leaders got up to make an announcement at the end of the night. He announced how he had created our Quest Bel Air Global Facebook page, and I was thinking to myself, “What does that all mean?”, while I could hear the cheers from the audience as if saying, “Finally!”

Ever since then I have been a big fan and it has revolutionized communication in our ministry. And yet, there is more we could be doing with it, I just haven’t had the time and figured out the best ways yet.

So I have some thoughts, but I would also like to hear from you, and see if we can find out some even more effective ways.
Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the topics I’m going to address in this series, this seems to be the no-brainer to me. I started blogging about 4 years ago at the encouragement of one of my students at the time, Jared Kleier. He set up a blog for me on our college website and away we went, though it wasn’t quite that easy. I remember writing and deleting one post after another because I had never experienced writing something for immediate consumption by the public.

All it took was some encouragement from others, and a few links from other bloggers, and then the blogging bug just seemed to take over.

Lots of people have various reasons for why those in ministry should blog. Mark Roberts has 18 Thesis’ for why pastors should blog. You can view his Powerpoint Presentation, Pastors as Blogger, at GodblogCon 2007.

Mark is just one good resource.

There are a lot of reasons why I think those involved in college ministry should blog, so let me give you just 11 (yeah 11) that come to mind and that I have found helpful reasons for blogging:

1. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate: A blog is simply in many ways about communication. When you blog, you communicate to others on a variety of topics.
   
2. Reiterate the Mission: When you blog, you can continually communicate, and therefore, one of the important pieces of communication is to continually reiterate and blog about the mission of the ministry. It’s a good way to remind students and keep everyone accountable, focused, and on task.
   
3. Encouragement: A blog is a great way to encourage those in your ministry, whether it be other staff, leaders or the congregants. Devotionals, posts of encouragement, thank yous, and recognizing others are just some forms. Read the rest of this entry »
   

I think it’s important for college ministries to be forumlating a plan, and developing some ideas about how they can strategically use the internet to best serve their ministry.

There are a lot of topics that I could cover, and maybe 9 posts is too much, so I will try and keep them shorter than my last post.

Last week I posted Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed. Bottom line: You need to have a design and plan that is simple (easy to navigate/aesthetically clean from a design point of view. You also should keep the costs low which is easy to do with all the free and inexpensive tools out there. And speed should be taken into consideration, mainly from the perspective of how fast can you integrate new technology to meet the needs and wants of your ministry. Way too many ministries plunge lots of cost and time into a site, that they no longer can adapt to changes, but are stuck with it for years to come.

Today I want to post about The Purpose of Your Website.

What is the purpose of your website?

This is an important question to begin with. What do you want it to do? What do you want people to come to the site and see and use? What should they walk away with? Sometimes ministries just build websites because they feel like they should have one, but never stop to consider its purpose.

Is it for college students to retrieve information? Is it for them to sign up for Bible studies? Is it for them to be able to visit forums and dialogue?

With these questions in mind we also need to keep in mind that with all the tools out there (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) a website shouldn’t have to do everything, unless it can do it better than those services (which I doubt it can do).

So here are a few pointers that I have found helpful:

Read the rest of this entry »