In the last few years a number of new private church community networks have been introduced into the market in addition to the development of numerous social networking sites. In January 2009, Unconventional Method began to design research to explore what churches are doing effectively online in this area and help shape the understanding of how churches can use the internet to gather, disciple and build community. From January 27 through February, almost 1,000 people participated in an exploratory survey examining what churches are doing with social and community networks.
Phase I research began to frame the landscape & attitudes in this space. In this research we examined questions such as: 
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In Phase II of the project, we will be expanding on many of the issues raised in the initial research. Through a more in‐depth survey and targeted phone interviews, we hope to develop a better understand how pervasive the use of these web applications is and how churches are approaching community and social networks.
We will gather data on usage, experiences, satisfaction, behavior, preferences, perceptions, and demographics. We will go beyond traditional metrics in order determine how these tools promote activities that are central to being Christian and being the church. Our aim is to both help bring clarity and guidance for churches to pursue excellence online while providing market intelligence that will help the developers of these applications improve their sales and products.
Having looked into several of these solutions for our church, I’m very interested in how these solutions not only allow for, but enable the networking of guests and non-Christians with the church (ie to actually HELP facilitate missional engagement and evangelism).
I’m also very interested in the demographics of social networking and how reasonable it is to predict, assume or presume that a wide demographic within a church desires to/is willing to adopt one medium as the means of communicating and extending community.
Interesting study. Perhaps its a good thing that Christians are involved with non church related web services more than church related web services. I’m all for using the Internet to build the church but some of that building needs to be done outside the church walls.
Yes, interesting review. Perhaps the church networking websites have a hard time attaining members because church websites such as mychurch.org don’t have the ability to easily be viral like facebook. Also, I wonder if because users have to create separate accounts for each of these social networking sites like facebook, myspace, mychurch, etc… that they are less enticed to join a certain site. It’s funny how sites like ChurchTag.com has all the features mentioned in the above article, yet churches/people hardly know about it.
social networking on the internet can be used to preach the gospel to every creature.
Mark 16:15
And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
kind regards,
It is now accepted on Church community having a social media on their sites.
I love this site, I’m glad I stumbled across this, great resource for ministry!
This article is very interesting. There is this Christian site which provides users with personalized prayer, bible study groups, online journaling, among other things. So it kinda addresses some the problems stated in this article. I asked a question on a forum which was focused on the reasoning behind the lack of awareness of Christian social networks. The responses were somewhat similar to the findings here.