I
received numerous invitations to join, but still I stayed away.
Finally, I received yet another invitation and it was from a friend my
own age, so I got on the bandwagon. A few days later, she chided me
because I had over 50 friends and now the number has kept increasing.
I'm talking about Facebook, the social networking site that connects
over eighty-million users to one another. Are you one of them?
As
soon as I joined Facebook, I was friended by lots of people that I knew
in the real world. As my network grew, I saw more and more people that
I knew and we 'friended' each other. I have been able to re-establish
contact with some friends that I'd lost touch with and share mundane
parts of my daily life with plenty of people who don't care!
I've
also discovered it is one of the tools that can be useful in ministry.
I see status updates from the youth in my group and know when they are
having a rough day. I have some who tell me that they don't use old
fashioned e-mail, just send them a message on Facebook. I have joined
groups for members of the ELCA Youth Ministry Network and am creating a
group to help those of us in the Montana Synod stay connected to one
another.
Facebook allows you to create
groups, so I have created a group for our high school youth group. This
gives me yet another place to publicize events and send messages from.
I can also share pictures within facebook and the youth in my group
will tag them with names of other facebook users. I think that every
photo I had uploaded was tagged within 2 hours of my having uploading
them!
There are countless applications that
are a part of facebook, some of which are useful, some of which are
silly, and some of which will cause you to waste much of your precious
time. I'm not going to recommend any particular applications, but I do
recommend that you check out what you are giving away when you install
one of them. There have been some privacy concerns associated with
specific Facebook applications and also with Facebook in general after
they tied purchasing information to specific accounts and displayed
that in the feed.
I do use the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox,
which pops up status change updates whenever I'm online and one of my
friends changes their status. It can be a little distracting when I'm
working on a sermon, but it's nice to know what's going on in the lives of my friends.
If
you're already on Facebook, keep figuring out new ways to use it. If
you're not, think about it the next time you get one of those e-mails
inviting you to join. Chances are, you'll be surprised by how many
people who know who are already using it.
Here are two other articles I stumbled upon which connect Facebook to youth ministry:
Tech Geek
Advice and new 'finds' in the tech world for those doing Youth and Family Ministry. Read about what's the latest and get your questions answered!
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