For years, I've been trying to get church leaders to adopt social media with mixed success. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the responses and recently got into another discussion about churches and social media. One person asked, "What will help you make the case to leadership who doesn't think social media is necessary at all?"

As I thought about it, I had to ask myself, is social media really necessary for a church? Whenever I speak with people about their desire to use social media, I try to get people to focus on how it relates to their mission. Too often, in the business or nonprofit world, people want to use social media because other people are using it.

This attitude was reflected in some of the responses, "Everyone does it why not us!!", "Social Media is Everywhere!" One person went so far as to jokingly (I assume), suggest a coup to replace leaders that don't embrace social media, and others echoed the suggestion.

I responded, "Perhaps, if a case needs to be made for a church to use social media, it isn't the right time for the church to use it." This was not well received by these social media evangelists.

A response I got was, "Congregation has to want to grow, reach out, spread the gospel." I noted that congregations have grown for two millennia without the use of online social media. I'm not sure that the desire to grow requires a desire to use social media, and I recognize that there are ways besides reaching out and spreading the Gospel that churches may find as more important missions.

I followed up with the question, "Should a Church feel *called* to use social media?" When you think about a church's mission, its calling, some seem to be called more towards worship, towards fellowship, towards outreach, towards caring for the needy. The decision about if and how to use social media needs to be tied to the specific goals of a church. Using social media as outreach is very different from using it as a form of worship, education, or ministry to the needy.

One person responded, "Does a church feel called to use a telephone? Or does it just do it? " To the extent that social media is simply another method of one person casually contacting another person, then that response might make sense, but if it is part of a larger mission, part of a ministry, it might require a little more thought.

Following the casual approach to social media, another person responded, "Social media is just another tool for evangelization and other forms of ministry". If that is all that it is to these people, perhaps they should just stay with using it themselves and not try to pressure people less comfortable with the specific tools of social media to use them. Each person should use the tool they are most comfortable with. Are all members tweeters? Are all members phone bankers? There are many gifts, yet one body. Yet I think there is something more to social media than just that.

I tried to reflect this in my comment about how "Churches need to discern which tools will work best for them." It ties back to mission. Using social media may be very useful in reaching certain audiences, but if you're really focusing on prisoners or people in nursing homes, it might not prove all that useful.

I write all of this as I prepare to head off to choir. I need to determine how my time will best be used. Will it be on Twitter or will it be in the choir loft? What is the right mix?

It leads me back to a favorite psalm of mine, Psalm 127. Paraphrasing it for the discussion, "Unless the LORD builds the website, the builders labor in vain…. In vain you rise early and stay up late, tweeting, for HE grants sleep to those HE loves sleep"

Folks in the discussion acknowledged that social media is time consuming, and suggested not mentioning that to church leaders, but I do believe we need to be good stewards of the time that the LORD has given us.

So, I offer this up to others as they think about if and how their church should use social media, or if there church really does have a social media calling.