Social media is new pulpit for preachers

The Times Union featured the following story about NY Council of Nonprofit's very own, Valerie Venezia and a specialized training about social media she presented to local churches.

The article relates: When Pastor Dan Rushing hits the streets of Albany to do ministry work, church members can track his movements from their home computers.

Rushing spreads the word of Jesus and his church, New Beginnings Fellowship, then types the details of his evangelism into his Blackberry and sends his GPS location to his Web site. He's mixing his preaching with social media — Web sites where users create and control content — to connect to existing and potential church members.

"Social media allows you to connect to people that you normally wouldn't be able to connect with," Rushing said. "There are a lot of people out there that the only way you're going to connect with them is these tools."

New Beginnings has a Web site where sermons are broadcast, a Facebook group page, a Twitter page and a MySpace page.

More churches are starting to use the Web sites to connect to their members in more ways, said Valerie Venezia, of the New York Council of Non-Profits, which has helped organizations enter the digital realm. Today she will be leading a workshop at the Capital Region Theological Center to help churches get started with social media.

Venezia will show church leaders and representatives from the Capital Region the building blocks for increasing their online presence. Participants will learn to use social networks, blogs and how to post videos or audio podcasts of sermons.

Venezia said organizations sometimes don't understand how the services would be of use to them.

"People will ask me 'Why does anyone care if I'm eating a ham sandwich?'" said Venezia of Twitter, a service where users post short 140-character messages to answer the question, "What are you doing?" "Well that's not what it's really about. It could be about crystallizing a thought about a sermon and sharing that with others."

Faye Bailey, church moderator at Emmanuel-Friedens Church in Schenectady is going to the workshop to see what services they can use. The church recently got its own domain name after being on a Times Union community page for years, and Bailey is looking for ways to let members connect outside the church and get more information.

But some members aren't too eager make it onto the Web.

Emmanuel-Friedens is divided into two groups, she said: An older legacy crowd and a much younger crowd that recently joined. When the new Web site went up, the older members voted against posting the newsletter, as they didn't want their full names posted for everyone to see, Bailey said.

So Bailey hopes to see what other churches have done and learn what measures can be taken to ensure privacy.

"Different people have different sensitivity levels with the Web," Bailey said. "So we have to be careful with that, yet, move forward. And younger people connect this way so we have to find a way."

With so many avenues for ministry, it's important to just keep focus, said Rushing, a self-proclaimed techie pastor.

"I think it's important not to replace what we have," said Rushing, asserting in-person preaching is still important.. "We have to be careful that the medium isn't the only message. That we're not seeing social media as the way they worship. We use social media just as the tool to get the message out."