Good social media ministries of faith development, social justice, pastoral care, multifaith dialogue, and spiritual practices all share three elements: (1) consistency over the long haul, (2) interaction with a community of followers, and (3) interaction with those the ministries follow and their peers. Each piece of the social media ministry takes care and attention. This week, let’s focus on building a consistent framework.

Before we do so, it is important to know your spiritual gifts and who you are ministering to. My social media ministry is thick with the ministry of encouragement. The people and institutions I connect most with are folks who are working to live in steadfast love, whether they belong to a faith community or not, and they appreciate encouragement. Encouragement happens to be a gift I can offer. Fortunately, it is also a gift lots of others offer, and I can share encouraging words, music, and art from others.

How do you already think through your ministry year? What are the seasons you observe? What resources does your community require in those seasons? What resources are shared during those times? Personally, I integrate several calendars to help me structure my social media ministry.  Since I’m a Unitarian Universalist minister, I include the seasons and times that are important to Unitarian Universalists. For example, I know when the stewardship seasons are because I want to provide helpful resources and encouragement around stewardship. I know when important meetings are because I want to pray some encouraging words. (Remember that I’m practicing a ministry of encouragement.) I also use a multifaith calendar to help me attend to my faith neighbors, and to help us all be more mindful and better neighbors to one another. Doing so lead me to engage more too with multifaith families, who can still feel like outsiders in many faith communities. In 2011-2012 I am also part of a group of faith leaders sharing a theme a month for twelve months.  Those themes affect my ministry. I also incorporate United Nations recognition days into my calendar, because they are not days promoting one nationality (my ministry is based in the United States, but is global) and because they promote values and issues consistent with my faith, including global community and world peace.

Once you have a sense of your ministry year, your gifts, and the communities with which and to which you are ministering, then you can create a schedule that will make sense to you. Let me take December 2011 as an example. This month, the theme is Hope, a plethora of faith holidays show up as well as United Nations recognition days, and many people are particularly struggling spiritually and emotionally with the season. In 2011, I shared resources related to James Luther Adams’ five smooth stones of liberal religion, immigration as a moral issue, peace practices and ethical eating. In 2012, I have been sharing resources on the spiritual practices of Reverence, Generosity, Learning, Community, Creativity, Sabbath, and Joy, on immigration as a moral issue and on ethical eating.

My schedule for Thursday, December 1, 2011 looked like this:

Chalice Lighting: Hope guide us into the adventure of loving, into the great gift of mercy, into generous joy. #chalicelight

Prayer: Morning Prayer Dec. 1 http://universalistprayers.org/2011/11/morning-prayer-december-1-2011.html

Daily Quote: Every action in our lives touches some chord that will vibrate in eternity. – E.H. Chapin (Universalist, minister)

Spirit Question: How are you acting for, in and with hope today? #spiritquestion

Holiday Prayer: #UU Rev. Wayne Arnason’s Holiday Season Prayer: http://www.uua.org/worship/words/meditations/submissions/5628.shtml

Observances Info: World AIDS Day 2011 – Get the facts http://www.worldaidscampaign.org/

World AIDS Day – Faith Advocacy Tool Kit http://www.worldaidscampaign.org/2011/10/faith-advocacy-toolkit/

Carbondale to Kabwe: Growth of an anti-HIV/AIDS Partnership http://www.uua.org/peace/stories/124384.shtml #uu #uua

Event to participate in: [TweetChat at Noon – sponsored by We Make The Change Florida @wmtcfl ]

Evening Prayer: Evening Prayer Dec. 1 http://universalistprayers.org/2011/11/evening-prayer-december-1-2011.html

5 Smooth Stones: 4^th Stone: Change-Agent – Halting the Spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa http://www.thp.org/what_we_do/key_initiatives/hiv_aids_and_gender/overview

Chalice Extinguishing: Breath of Life infuse us with hope to keep acting for merciful justice & in bold compassion. #chaliceout

Being the first Thursday of the month, it was also #TheologicalThurs on Twitter, when I shout-out a thanks to my theological peeps, whose diverse ministries enrich my life. More recently, I have shifted #TheologicalThursday or #TheologicalThurs to name those I’ve conversed with that week, or especially appreciated that month.

Note I also scheduled myself to participate in a community event that wasn’t faith based and I wasn’t leading. If I would attend such a forum locally as part of my ministry, I attend such fora digitally as part of my ministry.

Each week, I also include specific times to post blogs and other resources, like videos.

This kind of schedule can seem daunting to someone new to social media ministry. But I developed this schedule over time. First, I started with a daily 100-character inspirational message. Then, I added my daily prayer blog. Thirdly I added the spiritual practice of my faith tradition, the chalice lighting and chalice extinguishing (#chalicelight and #chaliceout).

Many pieces of my social media ministry schedule are things I already do, just sharing them in different ways. Since I have core spiritual practices I do every day, I just needed to spend a few minutes making those available to everyone. I was writing and teaching already; giving myself a schedule just made me more disciplined in sharing what I was creating and teaching. I read and collect resources online as part of my being in a larger community, continuing education, and developing thoughts and reflections and teaching. Sharing those resources across a schedule made sense because I was finding those resources helpful, inspiring, challenging, or otherwise affecting my faith.

Try setting up a minimal framework to begin developing consistency in your social media ministry. The discipline will grow and stretch, but also give something for a community to develop around and for your peers and the people you follow to connect with. Showing up consistently is part of how we build this global house of study.

This post is a reblog from an archived blog, since the material remains relevant.

Yes, there are people using social media to share their little sighs and their daily candy consumption, just like, before private telephones, folks used to hang out on the party line and gossip and listen in to their neighbor’s business. But if we can learn about how many candy bars a person consumed in a day, we can also learn about other things. Social learning is a life-long educator’s dream: environments where people learn and teach together, sharing resources, ideas, stories, questions, and wisdom. Furthermore, social learning depends upon self-motivated learners and teachers and learning occurs in little bits, information at an absorbable rate when we’re most ready to learn, generous sharing and working together, independent of the limitations of one community or leader, and always running.

Microlearning is one way of learning via social media communities, which is wonderful, since, like gossip, it is the kind of learning we do easily and naturally. Religious educators and faith development leaders who are utilizing the capacities of learning and teaching together through social media communities are utilizing one of the most effective tools for maximum faithing.

Twitter makes it easier than ever for faith development leaders to grow lifelong learning networks and to help their faith community members grow similar networks beyond congregational walls.  Every physical community has limitations in terms of the numbers of people an average congregant can connect with at the same time. While many faith communities have engaged both listservs and Facebook groups to strengthen conversation and connection, those are internal to the existing faith community. Moving into an open faith network using Twitter gives us connections to many more faith communities, and the wisdom, experience, and generosity of the huge numbers of people who are spiritual or religious but not members of faith communities.

Twitter’s limits are based on SMS communication protocols, so that the maximum number of people around the world, even those without regular internet access or smart phones, can participate through text messaging capacity.  While some religious leaders grumble about conveying weighty ideas in short form, what Twitter calls us to do is teach and learn in more accessible ways.  Memorable, pithy teaching is retweeted, favorited, and remembered. That means people are sharing that learning, returning to it, and have a better chance of living into it.

For a conversation, question, or piece of wisdom to be useful on Twitter and form a conversation, you need to use real hashtags that help people searching for that conversation. While a convention or conference hashtag is useful, in day-to-day life the most useful hashtags are not those that brand your faith community, but those that tell people something about what is in your message, question, or conversation. You might be inviting people to a #socialjustice action, engaging folks in questions about #parenting or teaching a #proverb . Keeping the hashtag within a faith community is helpful for truly internal conversations, but one must always remember that what’s posted to Twitter is in the public square. Internal community Twitter conversations are useful, and one way they are useful is making the internal issues and dynamics of particular faith communities visible to people outside those communities, who might be considering whether to become a faith community member.

Micro faith development goes on at all hours of the day and night, because people from all over the world are engaging one another in their faith questions and teachings and finding ways to work together, inside the larger faith communities and beyond congregations and in multifaith communities. One leader or even a team cannot keep up with it all, but we can faithfully participate, do our piece to live generously and faithfully, and attend to what others are sharing. Our local faith communities have limited hours for classes, community groups, and worship times. Social media frees us from those hours and gives us a chance inside those hours to connect faithfully with folks who are beyond the congregational walls.

The biggest lesson from Twitter that I’ve learned as a religious leader is trusting the generosity of the tweeple. Together, we have a chance to learn and to bless, to worship and to work faithfully, generously, every day and every night. Twitter is a space of service, of wisdom, and, always, of teaching and learning.

This post is a reblog from an archived blog, since the material remains relevant.