Gospel Centered Social Media Ministry is Not Your Grandma's Homepage

Churches understand that they need to be on social to grow their ministry, but along the way we've lost site of what it means to maintain a gospel centered social media ministry.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You visit a church's Facebook page and it filled with a collection of meme's, pictures of an event that heavily feature the food on the buffet table, and series of posts requesting volunteers.

What about this says anything about how Jesus is actively alive, changing your life right here in this moment?

Most of us started off on social media by building our own personal page. We put things on our page that resemble the sort of information we'd share in a family holiday newsletter - pictures of vacations and kids, articles we found interesting, an inside joke we know our core friends will find hilarious. Personal social media pages are created to nurture and maintain the relationships of people who are either closer to us or are people we haven't seen in a long time. They are very insider-focused, meaning that our pages are most enjoyable when we know and love someone.

When it came time to make the church social media page, we did what we knew - we made personalized pages and we write the content to appeal to the people we already know.

We forget that church social media has a deeper, more fundamental purpose - making disciples of all nations. It's not that we don't want to share our pictures or those interesting articles. It's just now we are doing it with the mission at the center instead of the periphery.

When churches make turn their accounts into a gospel centered social media ministry, it looks something like this:

• There isn't a single post that doesn't mention Jesus, Scripture, or the mission of the church. Even posts about pumpkin roll making connect the dots on why Jesus calls some people to be bakers.

• Instead of only promoting events that will occur at the church in the future, there are even more posts which tell people how they can add prayer and discipleship into their home and workday.

• Pictures aren't of the church building or buffet tables, but of people doing God's work, like volunteers serving at the food kitchen or members singing in the choir.

• Recordings of livestreams aren't the only time the feed offers good news. Posts with prayers and scripture quotes are a regular part of the posting schedule.

• Instead of hoping that the algorithm will put your content in front of people who live near your church, every post uses the geolocation features and hashtags with your city or county's name.

Gospel centered social media ministry is always about Jesus. If your church's page looks like your Grandma's homepage, then it's time for a ministry reset.

We are the church, called to make disciples. Social media is a tool for us to strengthen discipleship of people as they go about their daily lives.