Here’s a whiff of reality.
Half of all the communications that Rhett Smith receives on his cell phone are text messages.
Smith — who’s in charge of the college ministry at Bel Air Church in the Los Angeles area — no longer posts much information on his church’s Web site, because he knows that many young adults won’t bother to look there.
Instead, Smith relies heavily on MySpace.com and other social networking sites to communicate with students — they’re already there, so he’s created his own MySpace page. But increasingly he’s seen folks migrating from MySpace to Facebook.com — “Facebook has really exploded,” Smith said — so now he’s there too. He understands: social networking, at whatever the hot place of the month, is the way to get out the word.
Bit by bit, at least a few Presbyterians are learning that young folks today use technology like they breathe air — all the time, effortlessly, gulping it in as a natural part of the universe. And while many congregations are slow to catch on, some who work most closely with teenagers and young adults are surfing the technology wave too — figuring that the best way to communicate is to sink a line into what’s hot.
Some recent converts are the folks at the Montreat Conference Center in North Carolina.
In January, a conference for college students called ‘Searching for God Knows What’ drew more than 550 participants — by far its best attendance in more than a dozen years — using no print advertising at all.
Instead, a student from Vanderbilt University made a video (some images of a car driving down a road, a few lines about searching, a great song) that started to make the e-mail rounds.
“The buzz caught on,” said John Richardson, Montreat’s vice-president for development. The video showed up on YouTube and Google video; it generated 3,500 hits on the Montreat Web site.
Another draw was that Montreat reduced the cost of the conference and changed the date. Instead of charging $350 a person and holding it in May, the college conference was moved to Jan. 4-7, when many schools are still on winter break. And Richardson helped raise $60,000 to defray costs, so the fee for students who registered early was just $90 — including meals, registration, and lodging in Assembly Inn.
“If you have $60,000 in school loans and 12 bucks in your bank account, you’re not going to Montreat for a college conference” that costs $350, Richardson said.
But with a lower price, a new date and Internet buzz, the conference sold out.
And “the exciting thing for me was that 50 percent of the folks who were there had never been to Montreat before,” Richardson said.
Some of the buzz is coming directly from students themselves.
MySpace.com, for example, has a Montreat West group, to link up friends who went there in 2006 (in part so they can share pictures). There’s Montreat Rocks on MySpace for Montreat in North Carolina.
And some congregations and pastors are getting in the mix.
Uncle Calvin’s, an acoustic music coffeehouse held on Friday nights at Northpark Church in Dallas, has its own MySpace page, listing who’s playing when and inviting people to sign on as “Friends of Calvin.” (That’s Calvin, John Calvin).
Some congregations and schools are holding MySpace 101 sessions for parents — teaching them how social networking Web sites work and what dangers they can present for adolescents. Web-conscious youth ministers say, for example, that some teenagers post way too much personally identifying information on their pages and don’t realize how far their heart-baring can travel. Some youth ministers use MySpace or Facebook to gently keep tabs on the kids in their groups — and when they see a teenager who’s stepping over the lines, or clearly seems to be in trouble, they try to step in.
And some pastors are using social networking sites and blogs as a way to let the world know what some Presbyterians think.
On his blog, Bruce Reyes-Chow, a 30-something minister from San Francisco, writes about everything from “American Idol” to postmodern churches. On MySpace, Reyes-Chow talks about books and movies and how teenagers from a Montreat Youth Conference challenged him to get onto MySpace before he was too old.
A Presbyterian pastor from North Carolina writes that “I am interested in helping people understand Christianity — not to persuade or argue, but just help understand. Please send me questions!”
In an e-mail interview, Reyes-Chow — pastor of Mission Bay Community Church — wrote that social networking sites can give churches a “presence” in a place they otherwise might not be, can show appreciation for the ways in which young people are choosing to communicate, and “can help generate community beyond the building and even beyond geography.”
Reyes-Chow also said reviews of his church on Yelp.com (where people post reviews of products and places they like — called “yelping”) — have brought three new active members in the past three months.
Hansen Wendlandt, director of Christian education and youth ministry at St. Andrew Presbyterian church in Boulder, Colorado, started using MySpace when his church was under renovation and worshipping in an alternate space. He wanted to keep a sense of community at a time of disruption — and he knew that some kids in his youth group were already heavy MySpace users.
Through his MySpace blog, Wendlandt sends e-mails straight to the inboxes of everyone in his MySpace network. He puts up pictures and “some funny Jesus videos that we stole from another youth group.” And Wendlandt says, “I change my tone a lot on MySpace. It’s a lot more flippant,” more personal.
Some in youth ministry have raised alarms about churches using social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook — in part, because they can’t control where the links might lead and what content might be found there, and because of concerns about predators and privacy.
But it’s a powerful tool. With more than 100 million accounts, MySpace is one of the most popular Web sites in the United States, and Facebook is becoming increasingly popular among students. That’s enough to convince some involved in youth ministry to spend time there too.
Smith said he wasn’t convinced of the value of social networking sites at first, in part because of concerns about inappropriate content on MySpace — the bigger the circle of friends one gets, he said, the more “the content gets pretty crazy” — but he’s also become a convert.
By not using it, “I kind of felt we were sticking our heads in the sand,” Smith said. The young people were already there anyway — it was just a matter of joining them.
The night after Smith started his MySpace page, three new people showed up at a college ministry event. “I asked how they found the group, and they all said MySpace.”
Over time, he’s noticed the traffic on Bel Air’s college ministry Web site dropping off — but messages he sends out through Facebook get immediate reaction. Last summer, just spur of the moment, Bel Air decided to host a bonfire on the beach. Someone fired off a Facebook notice and, that night, a crowd showed up.
“I pretty much spend some portion of every day online” as part of his ministry work, Smith said. He switched to a BlackBerry to make text messaging easier. He prints out a flyer just a few times a year.
And on the social networking sites, he finds young people willing to communicate, almost all the time. They ask questions, they send him funny photos. “And sometimes they let their guard down” and talk about what really matters to them, Smith said.
There is, of course, nothing magic about any single form of technology — most come with some pluses and minuses. But some ministers, like Richardson, see a willingness to try new approaches as a measure, in part, of how serious Presbyterians are about reaching out to young people.
At baptism, “we promise to help guide and nurture them in the ways of Jesus Christ,” he said. Yet so many leave church when they finish high school and never come back.
Some say, “young people don’t want to be involved in church. I say that’s a load of malarkey,” Richardson said. “I think young people are desperate to have God involved in the conversation of what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives.”
