Using MySpace, Flickr, iPod & Other Technologies for Evangelism

The Wall Street Journal this week published a great article on the church using new technology.  Here's a snippet:

The percentage of Americans who regularly attend church services has been largely flat over the past decade, according to a survey released last year by the Pew Research Center.

Among evangelical churches, the use of technology to reach people who are nonbelievers is particularly important. The blog Outside The Box Ministry publishes instructions on using Squidoo, a site where users share Web links, to point people to evangelistic messages, as well as tips for how campus Christian groups can use Facebook.

"We're called to get the word out," said Bobby Gruenewald, new campus development leader at LifeChurch.tv, a group of evangelical churches in Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona. "We want to engage people where they're at. If MySpace is where they are, that's where we want to be."

Mr. Gruenewald directs a 30-person team of marketers, video editors and information technology workers. LifeChurch takes a broad approach to its use of technology: live feeds of its services are delivered through videocasts, podcasts, free packages that other Christian groups can download, and programming-code snippets for reposting on MySpace and elsewhere. Each of its seven locations has its own blog for local events and discussions.

"We've really found [the Web to be] a key to folks that otherwise wouldn't find a church," said Andrew Statezny, who uses MySpace to promote his church in Hendersonville, Tenn. The congregation's profile describes itself as "church without the fluff," lists Jesus and Elvis as heroes and is filled with images from "Napoleon Dynamite," one of Mr. Statezny's favorite movies.

Church Unplugged, which started with eight members last year, now has about 100 people attending Sunday services, and Mr. Statezny, 36 years old, attributes the surge to MySpace. "It's helped us grow," he said. Users might find a church's MySpace page while browsing for users located in their towns, or by searching for profiles that identify a common interest, such as a band or television show.

Still, the use of MySpace in particular remains controversial for many Christians because of the site's unmoderated nature. Internet filtering software available from the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, blocks sites like MySpace by default.

Jonathan McKee, who founded a church-education group called Source for Youth Ministry in Orangevale, Calif., said the challenge for churches is figuring out how to use MySpace to reach teens without exposing children to inappropriate content. (MySpace requires users to be 14 or older.)

"MySpace is a great tool for creating buzz," he said, "The trick is, how do you create buzz without endorsing something that can be potentially harmful?"

Technology is a tool that Christians should "redeem" for religious use, said Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church, which holds its services in movie theaters in Washington, D.C. "In the 15th century, Guttenberg used the printing press to make copies of the Bible," he said. "The church needs to find creative ways to help get some great content into these iPods."

You can read the whole article here...

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