Facebook for Faith: How churches should use Facebook Groups

Last month, Facebook made a splash with the launch of faith.facebook.com, a hub to connect faith leaders with Facebook resources. The site includes getting started information on Groups, Pages, Charitable Giving, Live, and other widely-utilized tools.

Atop the list of Facebook's resources for churches: Facebook Groups.

In 2018, Lifeway Research, an evangelical publishing house, shared survey data indicating that 84% of protestant pastors use a Facebook page to connect with their congregation. Lifeway is sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention and their data over-indexes on media-savvy evangelical congregations. Still, their findings point attest to how widespread Facebook has become as a church communications resource - even before the pandemic.

Many congregations are using Facebook to build online community. Yet most aren't using the Facebook feature specifically designed for community conversation.

That's partly because Facebook has struggled to articulate the differences, and the different value propositions, between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups. Let me attempt to clarify:

A Facebook Page functions as a digital billboard. It is public by default, so everyone can access all of the page's information. Churches widely use Facebook Pages to communicate important information on service times, meeting locations, and upcoming events. Originally developed as an advertising resource, Facebook Pages are Mark Zuckerberg's equivalent of the Yellow Pages.

A Facebook Group functions more like a digital meeting room. It is a collaborative space for multi-directional conversations. Unlike a Facebook Page, it is private by default. New members request to join, and administrators must approve the request. All who gather within a Facebook Group at least implicitly agree to abide by community rules and standards.

Congregations seeking to cultivate conversation on social media should look to Facebook Groups, not Facebook Pages. But most churches haven't set up a Facebook Group - at least not yet.

It's easy to understand why Facebook Groups should be a priority for churches. They provide a platform for collaborative, multi-directional, and asynchronous conversation. Nona Jones, author of the book "From Social Media to Social Ministry," summarizes her research into how churches use Facebook:

"The research pointed loud and clear to one major finding: people want to spend time on Facebook when they are able to engage with content in a meaningful way. And that content needs to invite conversation, not just consumption."

Setting up a Facebook Group is a relatively simple process:

• Create your group: Add a description of your congregation - and what types of conversations will take place in the group. Include photos from your church's life, and invite members to join.

• Customize the settings: Most importantly, determine the group's public visibility. Most churches will likely make their groups private, but visible in search results. This makes the group findable but restricts the visibility of posts and conversations to group members. You may also create a list of membership questions, to ensure those joining the Facebook Group have a previous connection to the congregation.

• Determine the privacy policy: In other words, determine the rules. Set expectations that direct group members to remind kind, courteous, and to respect the privacy of others.

Each step in the process is thoroughly documented in Facebook's guide "Getting Started with Groups." Examples are plentiful - click here for examples from Facebook's faith and spirituality category.

But cultivating Christian community takes more than software settings. It requires intentionality, answering questions like:

• What is the specific purpose of the group? Active church members spend just 8.3 minutes per day on faith-related activities. The most engaging church Facebook Group will never be a frequent hub of online activity. At most, members might check in on the group a handful of times each week. So give them a specific purpose. Does the group exist to share prayer requests? Does it exist to respond to the week's preaching text or sermon? Perhaps it was established as a replacement to a book study group and invites members to respond to a shared reading, video, or podcast episode. When it comes to church group purpose, less is more. If church leaders can precisely define the reason that the congregation should participate in the group, church leaders will find that individuals are more likely to stick around for real conversation.

• How will participation in the group integrate with the church's broader life together? Facebook Groups ought to be situated within the church's broader movement towards hybrid ministry. The conversation should not happen in abstraction nor in a vacuum but should respond to events in the community's life together. Sharing photos from an event, offering reactions to a sermon or podcast, or inviting reflection on a shared discussion question are ways to connect the digital Facebook Group to the analog aspects of Christian community.

• How can church leaders create a distinctively Christian Facebook Group? As the group gains traction within the community, our task isn't so much to cultivate conversation but to articulate lived experiences of faith. This is the difference between a distinctively Christian Facebook Group versus a group that exists for a non-profit or neighborhood. Eventually, the Group should become a place where ideas are exchanged and where community members share stories of God's work in their lives and world. Getting to this point takes effort, curation, and months if not years of active conversation. God can work through the discussions on a Facebook page, provided the community shows up for the conversation.

Have you curated conversations in your church within a Facebook Group? Share your experience in the comments below!

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@ryanpanzer, the author of "Grace and Gigabytes," accompanies churches on their journey towards more immersive, authentic digital community.

Facebook for Faith is here. Will it forever change church community?

Last Sunday, the New York Times published an article on Facebook's outreach to faith-based organizations. Recently, Facebook's top leadership has spurred the development of new technologies developed for faith communities. The company has also established partnerships with numerous denominations and interfaith organizations. Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operations Officer of Facebook, who has spoken publicly of the importance of her Jewish faith and heritage, is leading the effort, along with Nona Jones, the author of "From Social Media to Social Ministry."

Their work culminated in the launch of faith.facebook.com, a resource portal where faith leaders can learn about and deploy tools for their communities, from Facebook Live to online giving. Atop the resource portal is information on Facebook Groups, which Facebook sees as the future location of web-based religious community. Facebook continues to invest in the development of Groups, a feature and an offering that they see as the antidote to misinformation concerns on their platform.

Facebook's investment in technologies for faith communities is a significant milestone in the ongoing redefinition of church community. Early in the pandemic, faith leaders largely repurposed existing technologies for religious purposes. Now, tech giants have recognized the upside to engaging religious communities on their platforms and have begun developing their technology accordingly.

This development should prompt some ethical reflection, and perhaps even some scrutiny, amongst church leadership. What does it mean that tech giants, who didn't have much interest in faith-based organizations before the pandemic, are suddenly funding partnerships and software development targeted to the religious space?

For starters, it shows that big tech smells a business opportunity. For all of Facebook's rhetoric about communities and togetherness, faith.facebook.com would not have launched were it not a potential revenue stream for the social media giant. The simple, and perhaps ugly reality, is that the more faith communities venture on to Facebook, the more Facebook makes via advertising revenue as adherents and members view and click more advertisements.

Still, the fact that Facebook is a business should not deter churches from cultivating community on its platforms. From insurance providers to stain glassed window makers, congregations partner with businesses for many purposes, and church leaders should not dismiss Facebook simply because it is a publicly-traded corporation. And after all, there are more global Facebook users than there are Christians. Clearly, Facebook represents an important missional opportunity. It's where our communities can be found. Simply dismissing Facebook because of its vast wealth would be nearsighted.

Instead of rejecting Facebook for Faith, church leaders should consider how to establish well-marked boundaries between Facebook's revenue-generating impulses and the mission and vision of congregational life.

These boundaries can be established by decisions church leaders make about how to utilize Facebook for Faith. For example, a congregation might choose to limit their connections to the platform, so as to preserve some independence from the social giant. A church might collect donations from a platform outside of Facebook (Tithe.ly is one option among many). They might choose to deactivate the monetization of video content posted to Facebook, or even to host worship live streaming off of the social media platform, on a site like Vimeo Livestream.

Perhaps most importantly, these developments should also prompt faith leaders to consider boundaries between user data and Facebook's ever-present algorithms. Church councils and boards should be actively reviewing how member privacy will be respected not just on Facebook, but in all digital spaces where the congregation is present. One aspect of this review should concern images and video. Many continue to raise concerns over Facebook's facial recognition technology, which is capable of scanning any photo posted to the social media site. From photos to videos to blog posts and podcasts, congregations should be transparent about what they plan to share about their community's life together.

As an ethical principle, community members should opt-in whenever a church plans to post close-up photos and videos to any social media platform or website. But the conversation on privacy goes beyond photos and videos. Facebook can target ads based on user-generated posts and comments. This necessitates the development of a set of community standards, or rules of engagement, for any church Facebook group. Determine what topics should be kept for offline conversation. Specify how posts that encroach upon the privacy of others or that violate community standards will be handled. Name how community standards will be kept up within the group.

The quality of our partnership depends just as much on our own processes and commitments as it does on the actions of the social media giant. When we use Facebook for church community, Facebook will seek to monetize the connection. There's a reason why they are currently valued at over a trillion dollars. The question is whether this will be a fair exchange. Will Facebook monetize data that is best kept private? Or will a combination of intentionality, purpose, and privacy commitments from a congregation's leadership facilitate a mutually uplifting partnership?

Facebook for Faith is here, a sure sign of religion's sudden advance into digital ecosystems. Now is the time to plan how faith communities will make the most of the connections that Facebook has to offer.

In the next post in this series on Facebook for faith leaders, we'll dive in to some of the core features in Faith for Facebook, including the differences between Facebook Pages (widely used amongst churches) and Facebook Groups (widely promoted by Facebook).

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@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes," a book that explores what it means to minister alongside a culture shaped by digital technology. Ryan speaks to and consults with church groups seeking to redevelop ministries for a digital age.

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Future of Church: Measuring the "Effectiveness" of a Hybrid Ministry

Your church's top two success measures likely involve attendees and donations, or, to be a bit crass, "butts and bucks."

Don't believe me? Check out your congregation's annual report. Notice the data on attendance/membership. Notice the data on giving. See any other graphs? See any other numbers? Most likely, you do not.

Finances and attendance have long been the indicators of an "effective" ministry because they provide a proxy for "growth." If both numbers are going up and to the right, we have a growing ministry, and by the standards of the capitalist West, that's a good thing, right?

There's only one problem: donations are down. Attendance is down. Giving will continue to dwindle (thanks in part to the Trump tax law), membership will continue to fall. Sure, some churches will manage to be a temporary outlier. They'll find a way to increase their attendance, and drive up their giving - but this will come at the expense of other neighborhood churches. As Nona Jones tells us in her book on social media ministry, their success will be the demise of other congregations in their hometown.

If you're a member of the clergy, do yourself and your church leadership a favor: divest yourself of these success measures. They'll only wear you down, they'll only demoralize your community. These are the success measures of the "Christendom" church, when our surrounding culture created Christians for us, when the American way meant attendance in a building at a set time each and every week. These measures cannot guide us into the church's future. But what can?

If the future of church is to be a strategic blend of the online and the offline, with the objectives of collaborative service and faith formation, then attendance and giving are relatively meaningless. They can help to plan a budget document, but aren't much good beyond that. After all, how can you extrapolate an intent to live a life of faithful service from a stack of dollar bills? How can you find a commitment to missional collaboration by tracking the quantity butts on a bench?

It's clear that the future of church needs a replacement set of "success" indicators, "KPIs," or measurement tactics. For those who are curious what could replace revenue and retention, I would offer the following suggestion: the future of the church is about extending an invitation, then equipping for service. The future of the church is about creating a culture of collaboration so that all can participate in God's global mission. To that end, we have to arrive at a set of measures that somehow quantify inviting, equipping, and collaborating.

In a digital age church, inviting, equipping, and collaborating happen in a hybrid of the virtual and the face-to-face, through a blurring of distinctions between the online and the offline. To measure the effectiveness of the hybrid church, then, we must start by understanding the extent to which the online and the offline can be integrated in the life of a faith community. There are three concepts that allow us to do just that: coverage, quality, and connection.

Coverage measures the breadth of digital integration within a church community. For every act of service, for every act of worship, and for every conversation, there needs to be a digital invitation. Coverage, then, is measured by the percentage of church happenings that could be simultaneously accessed both online and offline. Was a worship service livestreamed? Then it met the requirement for coverage. Did a board meeting have a Zoom link? Then it has coverage. Coverage happens when we make an intentional effort to invite collaboration, especially collaboration that takes place through a screen.

Quality analyzes the depth of digital integration. For every opportunity to connect digitally, we need to understand whether the connection was seamless and easy. Quality is a subjective measure of integration, displayed on a sliding scale of low to high-quality experiences. If a worship service was livestreamed, but the camera was at the back of the sanctuary and the audio was patchy, the quality was low. If a Bible Study provided a conference call dial-in, and used a Jabra or USB microphone to improve the audio quality for those joining remotely, the quality was high. Quality happens when we focus on hospitality, on treating those who join our life together through technology as equal collaborators in the mission we share.

Finally, connection looks at the degree to which technology was actually used. Connection is a quantitative measure that resembles but is not synonymous with attendance. For every piece of blog content we created in support of a sermon series, how many read it? For every sermon we posted to Wistia, how many watched? Connection-based metrics, which look at raw engagement metrics, are still useful in the hybrid church, because they can tell us where our digital invitations are going unseen. If we find that our digital presence is going unnoticed, we might find that we have some further work to do in defining who we are called to be, and what we are called to do, in this digital age.

These three concepts have at their core three questions. In everything we do as church:

• Did we make digital collaboration possible?

• Did we do everything to make digital collaboration a high-quality experience?

• And did anyone actually participate digitally?

We can learn a great deal from these questions. They can help us to live into our new normal, to reimagine Christian community in a digital age. But they can't help us if we continue to ask the old questions. They can't help us if they go unasked.

Hybrid ministry in an eventual new normal will be quite different from the church we experienced in February 2020. Accordingly, we need to measure "effectiveness" differently. In doing so, we might just find that what we're after as church has nothing do with "effectiveness," and everything to do with service: collaborative, inclusive service, open to all, in response to God's eternal call.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes."