My Doctor of Ministry work is in missional outreach. And a significant part of this paper is on the use of social networking to reach people for Christ, both the old fashioned, "real world" networking and online social networking. I want to address the latter in this post, though both are intertwined. 

 

There are several elements to effectively using Facebook…

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I am not opposed to "advertising" for the church, particularly if it is tied to offering to meet a felt need in the community. But the most powerful form of "advertising" is the sharing of the gospel person to person through social networking. Today, obviously, we have tremendous online social networking tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that we need to utilize to reach the lost. But even without these tools, the early church grew from a small band of disciples in the first century…

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Yesterday, my wife and I and our two girls, Gina (10) and Emily (6), went to eat at Shogun's, a Japanese steak house in McKinney. Our kids love it there, as the chefs make the food right at your table and do all kinds of interesting little tricks, like burning an onion and making it a chu chu train. 

As the chef was making our food, we talked with him about his…

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In the recent book, The Facebook Effect, author…

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You can use Facebook as a broadcast medium, shouting out messages about your church, telling them about upcoming activities, etc.



But in reality, these are somewhat limited in value. I am reminded of what my Twitter friend, @MarketerMikeE said on this. Take a look at your last 20 tweets. Would you want to follow you? Does it scream me, me, me? Or are you being truly helpful to others. The same is true for Facebook.



You see, what people are really looking for in a… Continue