Part 2 of a discussion on doing more ministry online.
Read Part 1 (and the great discussion in the comments) here.
Think about what you would say to a brand new staff on your college campus:
“Here’s what you need to think through in order to be effective in doing ministry online . . .”
When it comes to doing college ministry online, there at least three different areas to think through:
- How does your ministry as a whole interact online with students (Facebook page, website, ministry Twitter account, etc)?
- How does your ministry interact beyond your local focus (generate/share resources with others, etc)?
- How does each staff do ministry online?
I’m passionate about all three.
But for this post, lets just focus on the third.
This is something I know many of us have wrestled with over the last few years and,
I’d love for us (tapping into the wisdom of the crowd) to compile a set of guiding principles on how to do (more) college ministry online.
I’ll get us started with a few:
1) Make it easy/quick for yourself to interact with students online:
- Get on Facebook AND Twitter
- Follow/Friend as many students on Twitter and Facebook as possible
- Get a smart phone — I do 90% of my connecting with students online in just 5 minute gaps during my day, in between appointments or sitting at a stop light.
2) Only do online ministry during cold hours
- I can’t say it any better than Andrew Wise in his comments on the previous post:
“It seems to me that a face to face interaction would be the best kind of ministry. So, given a limited number of hours, I’m going to fill as many of those hours as I can with face to face ministry. Judging by my experiences in the past, I am not going to be able to fill up all of those hours for various reasons (before lunch is usually no good, students in class, etc…). In those hours, perhaps I could be figuring out better ways to be an online ministry presence. I would not use hot hours (by definition the hours when students are most likely to meet face to face) for online ministry unless something doesn’t go as planned and I can’t fill those hours.”
3) Use social media to move toward or reinforce face to face ministry.
“The best way to take advantage of social media is to be savvy about using social media to move toward or reinforce face to face ministry” – Andrew Wise
Do you agree or disagree with those first few? What would you change?
How would you finish the sentence: “Here’s what you need to think through in order to be effective in online (and on-campus) ministry . . .”
What guiding principles would you add to the list?
photo courtesy of x-ray delta one