Uniting Christians through a church-based “Facebook”

I have always wanted to find ways to use technology to unite Christians. Yesterday, ACS’ president Hal Campbell talked about a networking platform for the church. He has also blogged about this. It’s a HUGE topic, and it’s worthy of great consideration.

This could be as simple as churches sharing calendars with one another or as complex as utilizing technology to organize ministries across geographic areas. Possibilities include sharing resources, encouraging people to plug into ministries where God is already working rather than creating another competing ministry, and more.

ACS already represents over 40,000 churches through their various products (ACS, Parish Data Systems, Membership Plus), and over 80,000,000 people are contained in the various databases of those churches. Many databases already reside on servers in Florence through AccessACS, LiveStor, On Demand, etc. We’re trusting them with a lot of powerful data.

So, building a “Christian Facebook” using that data is one way that this uniting-effort could be manifested. This would allow people to share prayer requests, get mobilized for local mission opportunities, collaborate on trips and events, etc. There are a number of great Christian and secular sites on the Web that accomplish many of these things, but they’re decentralized. Each one requires a different login and none of them have every church represented. The idea here is to create a platform that allows the church to link up.

The questions that are raised immediately:

  1. Is it the place of a for-profit Christian business to unite the church? I say, why not? They’re poised and ready to dive in.
  2. Who owns the data? ACS? The churches? The individual people? Is the church allowed to say that they will be sharing their database with other churches?
  3. Is it possible to create a platform that will link a majority of American churches together? What kind of buy-in would be required from pastors?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Uniting Christians through a church-based “Facebook””

  1. David G Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 10:33 pm

    While the concept is a powerful one, the same issues apply here as anywhere else in public (including the internet). Personal privacy is, and will always be a personal responsibility. This is why social networks like Facebook or business networking sites like LinkIn always require self-registration. The fact that a church has private information on their members does not automatically give them the right to publish that information or share it outside of that church organization. To be truly scalable, self-maintainable, and still protect individual privacy decisions, this would need to be structured like the other internet sites - someone hosts the main application and choses to use fees or advertisements to pay for the servers and storage.

    One way this can be accomplished by setting up a site on YAHOO GROUPS or GOOGLE GROUPS and then just advertising the site to other churches. It would require an administrator to keep “spammers” from registering and filling the group with unwanted information - but its free to use.

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